Athers and Kapil are only partly right

On the occasion of Sachin Tendulkar completing 20 years in international cricket, Kapil Dev opined in 'The Asian Age' that Tendulkar had under-achieved.

It depends on how you look at it. For someone who started off playing so aggressively and making bowlers scared of bowling to him, Tendulkar most definitely doesn't strike fear in bowlers any more. But that's true for pretty much every player who has been around for any length of time. I'm sure that towards the late 80s and early 90s, bowlers were queueing up to bowl to Viv. Murali hasn't been too good over the past year or so and there are enough questions asked about his place in the side. Kapil himself was about as quick as Mohinder Amarnath (with Jimmy at his fastest) in the last 2-3 years of his career. Lara's magic only happened in spurts towards the end. Steve Waugh fared little better.

Besides, all players change their styles to suit the team's needs, their own physical & mental state of being, etc. Until around the mid-90s, Tendulkar played in a very aggressive manner a lot of the time. But he could do that because the likes of Azhar, Sidhu and Manjrekar were around. From after the mid-90s, Tendulkar became the mainstay, and the batting revolved around him. From around the start of this decade to around 2004/2005, Dravid took over the mantle as the 'go-to' guy. Over the last 3 years, it has been Sehwag. Even though these changes happened, Tendulkar's wicket would undoubtedly have been the #1 wicket as far as the opposition was concerned.

So he could never ever have gone back to thrashing the bowling around every game, like he used to. In just the same manner as Kapil himself transformed from being a quick (let's say 140 kph types) bowler to being a fast-medium (130-135 kph) swing bowler because he realized that he would never have a long career if he'd continued as a quick bowler. Did that mean batsmen feared him less? Perhaps yes. But given he had now added a dimension of swing to his ability, it made him even better and batsmen obviously respected his ability to "make the ball talk".

Mike Atherton, writing in 'The Times', felt that calling Tendulkar the best ever was not right, because he had the benefit of so much body armour (helmets, better pads, chest guards, etc.)

That's fair enough. Anyone who tries to compare across generations is obviously being stupid. At most, you can compare folks with peers and players who played within a 10 year time period, with sufficient overlap in careers. Only Dennis Lilee would be able to get away with claiming that Mitchell Johnson was a oiag player. Either Lillee's memory is poor, or Aussie define a generation as 5 years.

But the point Athers misses is that those who played in a different era did so when there were no (or very few) ODIs or T20 games, no IPL or Champions League, no talk of burnout, test series had at least 3 warm-up games, etc.

It's interesting to think of how Hobbs, Bradman, Hammond, Sobers, Hutton, Bill O'Reilly, Harvey, Hanif, Bedi, Miller, Sutcliffe, etc. would have coped with all the travel, playing with 'niggling' injuries, spending so much time away from home, playing back-to-back tests/ODIs, playing back-to-back series in the span of a couple of months, etc.

Labels: atherton, burnout, greats, kapil, tendulkar

Thus spake Jagadish @ 1:21 PM | Sledge/Read 1 sledge(s) | Related posts
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Twenty years of Tendulkar

When I think of Sachin Tendulkar having played international cricket for 2 decades, I feel really old. It's been that long? Why, just the other day he was caning that Pakistani leggie wizard all over the park! A few days ago, he almost scored a test hundred, aged 16. After that, he was outscoring the rest of the batsmen on his first tour of Australia, aged 18.

In fact, very early on, I used to feel a bit stupid. Here was a chap just about 2 years older than me, playing test cricket when I didn't even get a chance to bowl in an intra-school cricket tournament although I'd been picked as a bowler!

It is pertinent to point out though that when I knew he'd flunked his class 10 exams and the rumour doing the rounds was that it was because of Shilpa Shirodkar, I was quite pleased with the way my life was progressing.

I had first come across Brian Lara in a newspaper match report where he thrashed the Indian bowling attack (if a "pace" lineup of Sanjeev Sharma & Robin Singh can constitute an 'attack') in a tour game. In hindsight, it would have been so eerie had Tendulkar made it to that tour. We'd now be talking about two greats making their debut at the same time!

When he went past Lara and became the top run-getter in tests, I wrote about how I was in awe of his skills.

Take a look at the list of youngest test players, specifically the ones aged 17 or below. Aside from Sachin Tendulkar, Garry Sobers and Hanif Mohammed, no-one else really qualifies as an all-time great. Even tech start-ups probably have a higher success rate!

The main aspect of his career that has really stunned me is how he has managed to stay so level-headed over such a long period of time, without doing anything stupid (let's ignore the Ferrari fiasco for e.g.) or controversial. Contrast this to how rarely a day goes by without the likes of Yuvraj, Harbhajan or Sreesanth being in the news.

If I had to pick one knock from all his knocks that I've seen, I'd pick the century he made at Melbourne in 2000. It seemed as though he was batting on a totally different pitch and against a bowling attack that was markedly inferior to the one that had blown away the rest of the batsmen. The only other times I've seen an Indian batsman do that were Rahul Dravid at Jamaica in 2006 and Virender Sehwag at Galle in 2008.

So, is it time for Tendulkar to become a little more selective about the tests he plays in? At this point in time, assuming that Yuvraj is now almost a test certainty, Badrinath, Suresh Raina and Rohit Sharma are in the queue for a test middle-order batting slot, with someone like Cheteshwar Pujara being a 'dark horse'. How do the selectors find out if any of them (or even Yuvraj beginning to bat at #4) are good enough to even have a 5 year career, especially when the volume of tests that India plays is likely to reduce.

Does Tendulkar have anything left to prove now? In fact, has he actually had anything left to prove now for at least the last couple of years? Would we grudge him if he throttled back on his commitments, so that he's fit & firing to help achieve what he seems to indicate would be a great way to sign off - India winning the 2011 World Cup?

Could we make the same argument to have Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman also skip a few tests every now and then? Perhaps yes, but they don't play ODIs. So playing test cricket won't really stretch them physically or mentally. But that's not the case with Tendulkar, who plays tests and ODIs.

Labels: tendulkar

Thus spake Jagadish @ 1:34 AM | Sledge/Read 1 sledge(s) | Related posts
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