2 weeks Ago By The Telegraph
Sachin Tendulkar was invited to Sir Donald Bradman’s 90th birthday party where they ‘discussed batting’ - Getty Images/Robert CianfloneLate in his life, Sir Donald Bradman identified the batsman who played most like him. “I was very, very struck by his technique,” Bradman said in 1996. “I asked my wife to come and have a look at him.
Because, I said, ‘I never saw myself play. But I feel this fellow is playing much the same as I used to.’“It was just his compactness, his stroke production, his technique.
It all seemed to gel.”The player’s name was Sachin Tendulkar.Bradman later invited Tendulkar to his 90th birthday.
“We discussed batting,” Tendulkar recalls. “How good batters could read the ball by looking at the bowler’s wrist position and also see which way the ball is spinning in the air and hence could read the delivery as soon as it was released.”The man who would become the heaviest run-scorer in Test history was first glimpsed on the maidans in Mumbai in the mid-1980s.
Most days, the young Tendulkar – his father was a poet and university professor; his mother worked for the Life Insurance Corporation of India – boarded bus number 315 from the suburb of Bandra East to Shivaji Park.The maidans are a characteristic of Indian cricket; their prevalence helps to explain the abundance of Test players, especially batsmen, from Mumbai. Dozens of matches take place in parallel; the field in one game normally overlaps with the adjacent field, so that extra cover in one game might stand alongside midwicket in another.
“Your peripheral awareness increased,” Tendulkar says. “After having played on these maidans, when I started playing in stadiums with only one match happening at a time, suddenly finding gaps became easier.”Aged 11, Tendulkar first met the coach Ramakant Achrekar.
He would take Tendulkar from one maidan to the next. He frequently played multiple games on the same day. The coach persuaded Tendulkar’s parents to move him to a different school which was better for cricket and Tendulkar relocated from his parents to his aunt’s, to be closer to Shivaji Park.
The young Tendulkar’s routine was relentless. During the summer, he batted for two hours in the nets from 7.30am.
Then, he went straight into a match at Shivaji Park, playing 55 games in 60 days one summer. Matches normally finished at 4.30pm and by 5pm, Tendulkar was in the nets again for another two hours, each broken into five chunks.
His practice would end with a final 15-minute session – this time on a wicket on the practice pitch. Achrekar placed a one-rupee coin above his middle stump. Tendulkar could keep it if he survived the session without being dismissed.
Facing up to 70 fielders, he had to keep each ball along the ground. After running two laps of Shivaji Park with his pads and gloves on, Tendulkar finally went home. He often spoke of cricket in his sleep.
“The maidans gave me exposure to playing on different surfaces at a very young age,” Tendulkar says. “Achrekar Sir, my coach, made it a point that I got to play on different surfaces against different bowlers.Tendulkar, the man who would become the heaviest run-scorer in Test history, was first glimpsed on the maidans of Mumbai in the mid-1980s - AFP/Indranil Mukherjee“A lot of these maidans were big grounds and had big boundary lines.
Hence, one had to run quite a bit between the wickets to score runs, which can become tiring. And when you are tired, the first thing that happens is that you lose concentration. Playing in those maidans in my school days was a good way to train and develop the habit of concentrating and maintaining focus for long hours.
”At Azad Maidan, 10 kilometres south of Shivaji, the Tendulkar name would first reverberate. In the Harris Shield, an annual inter-school tournament named after Lord Harris, Tendulkar played for Shardashram Vidyamandir. In a semi-final against St Xavier’s in February 1988, when he was 14, Tendulkar walked out at 84 for two, joining Vinod Kambli, a boy who was 15 months older and would play Test cricket alongside him.
The two batted in unison until lunchtime on day two, when their team declared on 748 for two; Kambli hit 349 not out, Tendulkar 326 not out. After the semi-final, Tendulkar was taken to the other end of the maidan and scored 178 not out in another game. Across the quarter-final, semi-final and final of the 1988 Harris Shield, Tendulkar’s scores read: 207 not out, 326 not out and 346 not out.
Aged 15, Tendulkar made his first-class debut for Bombay; batting at his favoured No 4, he scored 100 not out.The visored saviour of India“Batsmen walk out into the middle alone,” the Mumbai poet CP Surendran wrote in 1998. “Not Tendulkar.
Every time Tendulkar walks to the crease, a whole nation, tatters and all, marches with him to the battle arena. A pauper people pleading for relief, remission from the lifelong anxiety of being Indian, by joining in spirit their visored saviour.”Tendulkar had no choice but to accept this burden.
“I was aware of the expectations but did not consciously think of it,” he says. “I have always believed that people should expect something of you. I enjoyed the fact that people had some expectations of me.
It was all about messaging – what message I gave myself.“My family played a huge role in helping me maintain balance between my cricket and the rest of my life. They never treated me like a superstar.
My family and friends would be honest with me and that helped. It was like Formula One. You only get to see the driver on track but there is a huge team working with the driver in the background.
”A mural of ‘the visored saviour’, Tendulkar, in Mumbai - AFP/Indranil MukherjeeTendulkar developed a mantra: “Let everyone speak about the last game while we focus on the next one.” He recalls: “The next match always made me tense and that’s how I prepared. That’s how my body responded before a game and I embraced it.
”Overseas, Tendulkar thrived against fast bowling. “I have always enjoyed batting on pitches that had pace and bounce. I also used my height to my advantage as I focused a lot on picking the length of a delivery and I could get under the ball or leave the ball on length.
”For all of Achrekar’s training in his youth, about keeping the ball on the ground, “when the situation demanded, I did not mind being under the ball and playing the ball over the slips”. The uppercut became a trademark.But there was one player against whom this proved especially risky: Shane Warne.
“There were very few spinners in world cricket against whom hitting the ball on the rise consistently was not a wise option – Warnie was one of them,” Tendulkar explains. “Hence my approach against him was to wait for the ball to spin and play as late as possible. I would also mostly go inside-out and play with the spin.
”When Warne bowled around the wicket, into the rough, Tendulkar adapted his approach, taking “calculated risks” and playing more into the leg side, hitting against the spin. Tendulkar averaged 107.33 against Warne in Tests.
Tendulkar had to adapt his game against the spin of the late Shane Warne, and averaged more than 100 against him - Rui Vieira/PADefining hundred against EnglandOn November 26, 2008, a horrendous wave of terrorist attacks began in Mumbai. Over the next four days, Islamist terrorists, who had crossed the border from Pakistan, orchestrated a series of lethal attacks.The atrocities took place midway through India’s ODI series against England, which preceded a two-Test series.
One Test was slated for Mumbai. After the attacks, England initially decamped to the UAE, but then returned for the Tests in a rearranged schedule. Two weeks after the attacks, India met England in Chennai.
A fine Test reached its final act when England set India 387 to win – at the time, the fourth-highest successful chase in history – in 126 overs.Early on day five, India were 141 for two when Tendulkar entered at No 4, the same place from which he had made history as a 14-year-old. A wearing pitch presented diverse challenges: spin twins Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann; Steve Harmison’s bounce; Andrew Flintoff’s reverse swing.
Tendulkar withstood them all, showing his range of sweeps and swift judgment of length against spin, matching Virender Sehwag in uppercutting over the slips and placing the ball with finesse.As India neared victory, supporters cheered dot balls: an incongruous sight, explained by their fervent wish that Tendulkar would reach his century. India’s twin moments of glory – victory and Tendulkar’s hundred – arrived in tandem with a paddle sweep past fine leg.
On a cricketing level, it was a defining hundred: Tendulkar’s first in a victorious fourth-innings chase, an encore of his masterpiece against Pakistan on the same ground, only this time completing the job. Memories of the 1999 near miss were “there with me when we were chasing that big total against England”, Tendulkar recalls. After Yuvraj Singh attempted a reverse sweep, “I told him then that we should not take anything lightly and look to finish the game together”.
This is an extract from Test Cricket: A History – a new narrative history of Test cricket, which is out now. The book, which includes exclusive interviews with the game’s greatest players, including Sachin Tendulkar, Pat Cummins, Michael Holding, Muttiah Muralitharan, Kevin Pietersen, Ian Chappell, Dale Steyn and Rahul Dravid, can be ordered now through Telegraph Books.Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism.
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