If Mars Attacks

I am interested in greatness, not in damn dots.

— John Arlott, writing on W. G. Grace

Ricket chauvinism runs across two axes, those of nation and generation. When Steve Waugh came to the crease in the first Test of the current Ashes series, Bill Lawry welcomed him on television thus: "Here is the best batsman in the world." It was a title Waugh himself would have quickly disavowed. In the space of a few weeks earlier this year, he had fielded out to four centuries hit by a rival, two scored in Test matches played in India, two in one-day internationals played in Sharjah. At the end of it all he shook his head in wonder and remarked: "There is no one who bats like this guy— but then I did not see Don Bradman".

National pride promotes excess, while generational loyalty favours caution. In an article contributed to this magazine in March 1996, and timed to coincide with the first floodlit match played at the Wankhede Stadium, I allowed that our man of the moment was the finest Bombay cricketer ever, but not (yet) the finest Bombay batsman. For I treated with deliberate respect the claims of Sunil Gavaskar, the hero of my youth, and Vijay Merchant, the hero of my uncle’s. Ask me again in five years time, I said, and I’ll reconsider the question.

In less than three years I have an answer to report. Sachin Tendulkar is the greatest batsman produced by the city of Mumbai, and by logical extension, the country of India. The chauvinism of Australian commentators notwithstanding, he is also by some distance the best batsman in the world. But I have now been asked by the editor of Outlook to set my sights higher. What, he asks, is the precise place commanded by the Bombay Blaster in the history of cricket? As Steve Waugh implies, and millions of Indians confidently assert, is Tendulkar already in the Bradman class? Would he walk into an all- time World Eleven chosen to play against the Monsters of Mars?

If we follow John Arlott and don’t go strictly by the numbers, we must judge cricketing greatness across three broad criteria: versatility, character, and peer review. Versatility is in part a gift of Dame Luck, a function of being at the right place at the right time. Tendulkar, in the ’90s has a far wider range of cricketing opportunities than did batsmen of previous generations. Don Bradman had a dazzling array of strokes all around the wicket, yet he was allowed only to unfold them in the Test match arena.   And that too in two countries, for in his generation Australia did not tour the West Indies, India or New Zealand, while Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Zimbabwe did not exist as cricketing entities.

But consider how swiftly and compellingly Tendulkar has seized the chances that fate has given him. Even that old reactionary racist P. W. Botha would, one thinks, have welcomed the end of apartheid for the two cricket tours by India it allowed, in each of which Tendulkar hit rapid hundreds against the finest bowling and fielding side in the world. His skill and command of varying conditions is brought into relief when Sachin’s record is placed alongside that of Mohammed Azharuddin. Azhar is an acknowledged master of slow to medium bowling on slow to medium wickets— but no satta walla would put his money on him scoring over 20 against Curtly Ambrose in Kings-ton or Glenn McGrath in Perth.

In living memory only Vivian Richards and Graeme Pollock have so dominated the best bowlers in the world. While they batted, Richards answered to the few million black men of the Caribbean, Pollock to the equally numerous white rulers of South Africa. But Tendulkar now has placed on him the burdens of one-sixth of humanity; what’s more, he has often to carry it alone. Richards and Pollock each embellished batting sides of staggering depth and consistency. One had Gordon Greenidge to bat before him and the likes of Clive Lloyd and Alvin Kallicharan to follow. If the other got a duck, he returned to the pavilion in the assurance that Barry Richards or Eddie Barlow would get the runs needed by his side. However, while Indian batsmen excel at home, they are notoriously fragile overseas; given a bouncy wicket, they fall quicker than you can spell ‘coalition government’. When Tendulkar opens in a crunch match nowadays, he knows that if he fails his side generally fails too. 

The Mumbai columnist C. P. Surendran has written evocatively of what Tendulkar   means to this nation of losers. Every time he walks to the wicket, "a whole nation, tatters and all, marches with him to the battle-arena. A pauper people pleading for relief, remission from the life-long anxiety of being Indian... seeking a moment’s liberation from their India-bondage through the exhilarating grace of one accidental bat." No other cricketer has so fully represented the hopes of so many cricket-obsessed junkies.

Tendulkar knows not where he will play his next innings (Sharjah, Singapore, or Sydney). He knows not whether his team- mates will bat more than a few balls each with him. He knows only that his bat has, willy-nilly, to make up for the fact that the United Nations authoritatively asserts that India is the 146th most developed nation in the world. That he is so marvellously cool about this is perhaps the most remarkable thing about him. His gifts of character, if anything, exceed his cricketing gifts. Look into yourself, dear reader,  and examine afresh how you react to a child who wails at night, to a hard disk that crashes when you are finishing a book, to an examination paper that is to be answered at eight the next morning. We routinely respond with anger or dis-belief to the most trivial tests of character. Yet this man meets with complete equanimity the intensely magnified and completely unfair expectations of a billion of his countrymen.

His adversaries know not of these burdens. They see only the cricketing genius, and rise to honour it. Some do it openly, as when Shane Warne walked around to the Indian dressing room after the final of the Sharjah tournament in April, to ask his tormentor to sign (left- handed) on his T-shirt. Others do it indirectly, as when Brian Lara batted against Tendulkar in the ‘mini- World Cup’ in Dhaka in October, batted, that is, with paranoid care against a part-time bowler. That night Lara displayed a fear not of his opponent’s innocuous off-breaks, but of his own declining reputation. How would it look if, having had the crown so abruptly and comprehensively seized from him, Lara the batsman got out to Tendulkar the bowler ?

Even Englishmen, who are otherwise so parsimonious in praise of their opponents, have unbent in the case of Tendulkar.When Sachin batted at Headingley in the Test match of 1990, Sir Leonard Hutton told Freddie Trueman he could not remember when he had last seen such quick and sure footwork. Trueman told the story on the BBC , adding his own recommendation. This is the only known occasion on which either of those Yorkshiremen is known to have paid a compliment to an Indian. The next year, the Bombay cricketer became the first overseas professional to be contracted to Yorkshire. A little brown boy had found his way into the hearts and cheque- books of the most insular and tight- fisted community in the universe.

Sachin Tendulkar is a batsman of wide-ranging skills and matchless temperament, a cricketer who commands generous respect among his peers. That much is evident, today, but how do we judge him in the broad sweep of history? Would he, for instance, figure in a World Eleven against Mars? Now if the match was being played over 100 overs, 50 overs for each side, and with the off- shore venue in Jupiter suitably lit up by meteorites, then Tendulkar’s would be almost the first name this selector would pencil in. The eleven chosen by me would read, in batting order: 1. S. R. Tendulkar (India). 2. D. L. Haynes (West Indies). 3. I. V. A. Richards (West Indies). 4. Javed Miandad (Pakistan). 5. C. H. Lloyd (West Indies— captain). 6. W. J. Cronje (South Africa). 7. A. P. E. Knott (England— wicket- keeper). 8. Wasim Akram (Pakistan). 9. S. R. Warne (Australia). 10. C. L. Ambrose (West Indies). 11. J. Garner (West Indies). 12th man: J. N. Rhodes (South Africa).

If this mythical match were  played in pyjamas and under lights, Tendulkar will walk into the side. He shall take first strike, and later in the night chip in (aided by Cronje and Richards) as the ‘fifth’ bowler. What if this was a more conventional five-day Test? In ’88, when Sachin had not yet played for India, the Jamaican politician and cricket buff Michael Manley chose an all-time XI to play Mars. His side read: 1. J.B. Hobbs (England). 2. S.M. Gavaskar (India). 3. D.G. Bradman (Australia—captain). 4. G.A. Headley (West Indies). 5. I.V.A. Richards (West Indies). 6. G. St. A. Sobers (West Indies). 7. W.A. Oilfield (Australia—wicket-keeper). 8. M.A. Holding (West Indies). 9. R.R. Lindwall (Australia). 10. D.K. Lillee (Australia). 11. W.J. O’Reilly (Australia).

Think, if you will, of the batsmen left out in this selection. They include Walter Hammond, Graeme Pollock, Miandad, Border, Neil Harvey, and the three W’s. Indeed, in a display of the partisanship that is inescapable in this kind of exercise, Manley substituted Richards for Hammond in the proofs of his book. An indefensible substitution, in my opinion, for Hammond was as good as Richards with the bat or in the field, and a much better bowler besides. Still, if we are to update this eleven in 1998, where does Tendulkar fit in? The first four in the order are impregnable. They have done things our man hasn’t, such as score double and triple hundreds and save Test matches as well as win them. But the case can be made, and not with the tiranga jhanda alone, that Tendulkar is a better all-round batsman than Viv Richards was. But I would have chosen Hammond in the first instance. If push comes to shove, I might alternate between the two. Tendulkar could come in if the wicket was slow and dusty, like the ones at home, but he would yield to the Englishman if it was a green top, in conditions calling out for Hammond’s defensive skills with the bat and his control of swing and seam with the ball.

That, in a capsule, is how History Judges Tendulkar. But let me end with a more fallible but equally meaningful guide to greatness, namely, individual memory. Indians who follow cricket at millennium’s cusp shall always remember the times they saw Sachin bat ‘live’. Now I once watched Sunil Gavaskar bat all day against Pakistan in Chepauk. At stumps he was 92 not out, and next morning I had to catch a train to Calcutta. I never saw a Gavaskar hundred, and for a while it seemed that the jinx carried over to his successor. In 1990 I went to the Ferozeshah Kotla to see a Wills Trophy match, but Mumbai got the runs before their 16-year-old number four, fresh from his debut Test series in Pakistan, got to the wicket. Three years later I watched him, at the same venue, score 70-odd against Zimbabwe. Through a short winter afternoon Tendulkar took on John Traicos, a lawyer of Greek extraction who had taken Test wickets before he was born. He played the off-spinner with masterly precision, scoring mostly through cuts and sweeps. He looked set for a hundred, but then played an unknown fellow named Ujjesh Ranchod into the hands of extra cover.

Then, in February 1994, I timed a trip to Bangalore to catch a Test and Sachin at bat. On this occasion, a controlled innings exploded in the dying overs of the first day, when he plundered Pramodya Wickremasinghe for 18 in an over, to reach 80 by the close. The next morning he proceeded carefully to 96, when he lost his off-stump trying to cut the left-arm spinner Don Anurasiri.

The last time I saw Tendulkar in the flesh was in the Bangalore Test of March 1998. I had arrived that morning from across the Kala Paani, and by the time I shrugged off customs and jet-lag to get to the Chinnaswamy Stadium, it was lunch. Four hours of cricket was all I would get, for next morning other business called. Sidhu got out after the interval, and Sachin came in. He started confidently enough, but I was not confident my jinx would be broken. I remembered Gavaskar at Chepauk, and saw too that Shane Warne was no Ranchod or Anurasiri. However, in three hours of almost chanceless batsmanship Tendulkar had got to his hundred. Of his strokes that day, I remember most clearly two rifle-shot straight drives off Michael Kasprowiscz, and some lovely late cuts off Warne. He made one error though. Greg Blewett threw in a bouncer, and Tendulkar was struck momentarily by indecision, for it was the last over by tea. He was a little late on the shot, but the top-edge fell harmlessly between fine leg and the wicket-keeper. The normally phlegmatic Australian captain, at slip, violently stamped on the ground, a gesture that was, in its own way, as sincere a tribute as any other spelt out in this essay.

My eight-year-old son has watched Sachin bat once, in a one-day against New Zealand that I was myself com-pelled to miss. He scored a hundred, at better than a run-a-ball. I tell my son about the innings I saw, about the mastery of Warne and Wickremasinghe and Traicos, and he tells me about the straight sixes hit off Dipak Patel. The conversations will (we hope) continue well into the next century, about yet-to-be hit centuries. Do we need to remind ourselves that the man is not yet 26? And that Bradman and Richards both retired at 40, or Gavaskar and Border at 38? Is Sachin Tendulkar one of the three best batsmen ever known to the game of cricket? Ask me in 10, no, in five years time.