I. Mukul Kesavan: “A farewell left too late,” courtesy of ESPNcricinfo
Hang on, he hasn’t left yet. The time to pay tribute, to lift our eyes from the here and now and celebrate a great career, to memorialise genius, will come when Sachin Tendulkar‘s cricketing life ends with the second Test against West Indies in late November. This is the time to debate the manner of his going, the timing of the departure. And no, it isn’t bad form to do this: Tendulkar is an active player; embalming fluids like reverence and nostalgia can wait. The last great Bombay batsman retired without notice. He played one of the great innings against spin bowling on a pitch that turned square, 96 in a losing cause against Pakistan in Bangalore and left. He was 37. He was in the form of his life: his last 25 outings had yielded four centuries and six fifties at an average of over 58.
Tendulkar’s retirement, in contrast, has been chronically foretold. Not by him but by his bearish batting form. In his last 25 innings Tendulkar has scored four fifties, no centuries, and has averaged under 30, more than 20 runs off his career average. He is 40; he has been in decline for at least two years.
young Sachin toasts Yorkshire
Enoch Powell famously wrote, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Substitute “political” and “politics” with “cricket” and you have the justification offered by Tendulkar’s partisans for his unwillingness to acknowledge cricketing mortality. Don’t all cricketing lives taper off, they ask. Why shouldn’t a genius like Tendulkar be allowed to rage against the dying of the light?
If this is a serious question, not just a rhetorical flourish, it’s worth answering. First, there is nothing inevitable about great batsmen eking out unworthy ends. Not all cricketing lives end in failure; some manage the proverbial blaze of glory. Look at Sunil Gavaskar and his valedictory 96. And if Gavaskar belongs to the past, that foreign country where things are done differently, let us look at Tendulkar’s contemporaries.
Steve Waugh‘s last series – against India – was a PR spectacular, so it’s almost unfair to compare that leave-taking with anyone else’s, but it’s worth noticing that the run-up to that climax was pretty impressive too. Waugh’s last 25 innings include five centuries, six fifties, and his average in this final phase of his career makes Gavaskar’s seem modest: Waugh averaged close to 65 per innings.
His compatriot Ricky Ponting makes for an interesting comparison. He is Tendulkar’s nearest contemporary, 38 years old to Tendulkar’s 40, and he played his last Test a year before Tendulkar is scheduled to play his, almost to the day. Like Tendulkar, Ponting was criticised for lingering after his “best-by” date. But for someone who overstayed his welcome, the 25 innings rule-of-thumb tells us that Ponting averaged 38 to Tendulkar’s 28. He also managed to produce a century and a double-century through this batting twilight.
But it is the comparison with Brian Lara, by common consensus Tendulkar’s greatest batting contemporary and his closest contender for the title of the best batsman of the fin de siècle, that speaks most directly to the “dying of the light” argument. Look at Lara’s last 25 innings. He averaged just under 45, more than ten runs an innings better than Tendulkar, but that’s almost beside the point: it is his big scores that stand out.
Lara hit two centuries and two double-centuries in his last year of Test match cricket. These centuries were scored against substantial teams: Australia, India and Pakistan. For a team in near terminal decline, against strong opposition, Lara fought magnificent rearguard actions; in the grim desert of West Indian decline, he blazed like a brand; he raged against the dying of the light. Teams give ageing, inconsistent geniuses the benefit of the doubt because they believe they are still capable of match-turning bursts of inspiration. Lara repaid that faith; Tendulkar hasn’t.
Over the last two years Tendulkar has been more accountant than artist. His ledger is filled with entries that tally quantity and longevity. He has a 100 international hundreds, over 34,000 international runs, and by the time the Wankhede Test is done, he will have become the first cricketer in the history of the game to have played 200 Test matches.
Sachin interviewing Lara
Over the last two years he has plodded towards these landmarks with all the flair of a time-serving journeyman. From being a batsman who brought to the crease the intent of Viv Richards in a rage, he has become a batsman as intent on self-preservation as Boycott batting out a bad patch.
Does it matter? He remains the greatest batsman of his generation and India under Dhoni are once again near the top of the Test match tree. Tendulkar carried India, so the argument goes, for more than 20 years: can’t India carry him for two?
No. It can and has, but it shouldn’t have. Children ought to be indulged, not great men, and Tendulkar is an immortal. These two years have damaged Tendulkar, the Indian team and cricket as an international game.
Kapil Dev prolonged his career painfully as he chased after Richard Hadlee’s then-record aggregate of wickets. By the time he huffed and puffed his way past the mark, a career marked by loose-limbed grace had begun to seem a little laboured and leaden. And for what? With Murali on his Everest, Kapil’s summit begins to look like base camp. In much the same way, Tendulkar’s legacy has been diminished by his long twilight.
The team he served for so long with such distinction has been damaged too. If he had left, as Dravid did, in early 2012, after the rout in Australia, India’s middle order might have completed its post-Galactico transition earlier. Shikhar Dhawan, Murali Vijay, Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara, Rohit Sharma and company might not have set the world on fire if Tendulkar had left then, but they would have been hard put to do much worse than he did during this time.
Most importantly, if Tendulkar had retired earlier, India might not be playing an unscheduled two-Test engagement against West Indies at the expense of a proper Test series against South Africa, Test cricket’s top-ranked team. It is no secret that this attenuated “series” against one of the less formidable Test sides in contemporary cricket was likely dreamt up by the BCCI to give Tendulkar a comfortable way of both getting to his 200th Test and saying farewell at home.
Think of the enormity of this: the Future Tours Programme has been disrupted, the financial standing of the South African board compromised, a marquee contest between the first- and third-placed teams in Test cricket put at risk or, at best, abbreviated, just to make sure that Tendulkar can retire at the time and place that suits him best. The BCCI might well be settling other scores with CSA, and Tendulkar may not have asked for the West Indian tour, but what are the chances it would have materialised if he had retired earlier or, alternately, committed himself to touring South Africa? Zero.
This destructively delayed retirement and its fall-out isn’t Tendulkar’s fault alone. He is such an extraordinary cricketer, and we are such a needy nation that as a cricketing public we have created a force field that has skewed the game’s priorities and conflated Tendulkar’s well-being with the good of cricket. No individual, or so the cliché used to go, is bigger than the game. There’s an exception to that rule now: for the duration of the series against West Indies, till the end of Tendulkar’s 200th Test, Test cricket will principally be an occasion for rehearsing Tendulkar’s greatness.
Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in New Delhi
Pic from Getty
II. Allan Massie: “Sachin Tendulkar: the perfect batsman” in Sport
It is not quite time to say “Goodbye and thank you for the memories” to Sachin Tendulkar, for he will play two more Tests against the West Indies in November, and there may yet be another century, perhaps in the second of these Tests which will be his two hundredth. I hope so, not only because it would be the right way for him to disappear into the pavilion for the last time, but also because any young cricket fans who may have seen him only in the last year or 18 months can have no idea of just how great a batsman he has been.
Don Bradman played Test cricket from 1928 to 1948, with of course a gap because of the war. In that time he played only 52 Tests, with 80 innings. Tendulkar played his first Test, aged only 16, 24 years ago. So his career has been longer than Bradman’s, and he has played almost four times as many Tests, more than four times the number of innings. This alone, apart from countless other considerations, makes comparison pointless. Bradman had time to recharge his batteries between Test series; Tendulkar has never been off cricket’s treadmill – he has also spent almost a year and a half of his life playing One-Day Internationals.
They have this in common. Each played under a greater weight of public expectation than almost any other cricketer I can think of. Bradman was Australia; Tendulkar has been India. There is a difference however. Bradman was resented by some of his team-mates, as Tendulkar apparently hasn’t been. Nobody seems to have had a bad word for him.
Otherwise comparison between great players of different eras is futile, no matter how agreeable a parlour-game it may be. Even comparison between contemporaries is difficult. Was Tendulkar greater than Brian Lara or Ricky Ponting? Who knows? We may say that Ponting never had to face the best attack of his time, it being the Australian one, or that Lara scored more big hundreds than Tendulkar, while also failing more often. On his day, Lara was the most destructive of the three, but the one who, at least early in his innings, gave the bowlers most hope. As for Ponting, he was, throughout his career, the man on whom Australia most depended, especially in his later years when Australia were in decline. Both were more savage destroyers of attacks than Tendulkar.
Yet, even if we agree that comparisons are odious, there is one reason for thinking Tendulkar the best of the three. If everything about batting was forgotten, you could reconstruct its art and craft from a video or DVD of a Tendulkar innings. He was technically perfect, wonderfully orthodox in his play – even if in one-day cricket especially he was also inventive. He played two of the most difficult shots to perfection: the on-drive and the offside back-foot drive. Balance and timing were the secrets of the on-drive, foot moved slightly to the onside of the ball, head right over it.
As for the back-foot drive, there are many batsmen who play that very well square of the wicket; Tendulkar saw the ball so early that he could hit it wide of extra-cover’s right hand, and, though a small man, could so this against the fastest bowlers. It was a shot that took your breath away.
Like most of the greatest batsmen he was essentially a back-foot player. Indeed there was a time in Australia when he found that on account of some temporary technical glitch he was getting out when he tried to drive off the front foot through the covers. So he cut the shot out – and made a double hundred almost entirely off the back-foot.
Though so technically perfect, there was often a suggestion of vulnerability, as if he was still the small boy thrown in at the deep end. Perhaps this was why he aroused a protective feeling in me. Certainly I never wanted to see him get out, let alone fail – which of course he rarely did. His consistency over so long a career has been remarkable. He played the fastest bowling with courage and skill; he was also Shane Warne’s master. We are lucky to have been able to watch him for more than two decades, and who knows? There may still be a glorious last curtain. A century in his last Test would mean that he had made as many Test hundreds – 52 – as Bradman played Test matches. That would surely be the perfect end, for the perfect batsman.
III. Gideon Haigh: “Mastery with grace. Tendulkar is his Own Power Source”
AT the 2011 unveiling of the statue of Shane Warne that now trundles into eternity outside Gate 3 of the MCG, Mark Taylor told a story of Warne bowling to Sachin Tendulkar at Chennai 15 years ago that was worth setting down in similarly permanent form. In the Test’s first innings, Warne had dismissed Tendulkar cheaply, caught by Taylor at slip; naturally, Warne was quickly called up when Tendulkar came to the crease in the second innings and began with a wicked, fizzing leg break. Tendulkar slapped it reproachfully through cover for four….
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* A tribute in particular to two of his best strokes: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/allanmassie/100070980/sachin-tendulkar-the-perfect-batsman/
* And two pictures of the back-foot punch/drive: http://www.espncricinfo.com/india-v-new-zealand-2010/content/image/488238.html ……………. http://www.espncricinfo.com/nzvind2009/content/story/395943.html
* Here’s literally a coaching manual shot of the on-drive: http://static.espncricinfo.com/db/INTERACTIVE/COACHING/BATTING/STRAIGHTDRIVE.html
* And for the [Yorkshire] Tykes on this list, here’s one with him in flat cap and pint of bitter (pity they didn’t get the detail right – the pint glass says Tetley’s and not Black Sheep!) … http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2011/jun/29/sachin-tendulkar-yorkshire-cricket