Anybody who has had direct dealings with Sachin Tendulkar — who on Friday became the leading runscorer in Test history — will have their own memories of the man, and mine are his slippers. Bear with me: there is a point to this story.
Last year, during India’s tour of England, I had the rare opportunity to interview the great man in the lead-up to the first Test. The Indian team were staying at a hotel in the Essex countryside and I was told to go there and await my summons. After much hanging around, and some last-minute negotiations, it was decreed that Tendulkar would grant an audience but, Howard Hughes-like, only in his room.
There, in his curiously soft, high-pitched voice, Tendulkar spoke for the best part of an hour about his career and — this view burnt bright — his constant love of cricket. When it was put to him that his game was in decline, and that he had become vulnerable to short-pitched bowling, he bristled. As photographs were taken afterwards (again, in the room) I took in the scene. Tendulkar’s room was very tidy. Clothes lay over furniture rather than on the floor; most possessions were stowed neatly in an open suitcase.
Then, behind an armchair in a corner, I spied a pair of slippers. They were like Aladdin’s slippers, curled up at the front and studded with jewels (at least they looked like jewels). Immediately it occurred to me that Tendulkar had placed them there because he didn’t want a stranger to see them. I felt like an intruder. Tendulkar has spent all of his adult life fighting for every precious moment of privacy he can find — the stories are legion of him going out in the dead of Mumbai’s night, sometimes in disguise, to escape the crowds — and here was I, prying into one of the few remaining spaces he could call his own, the space behind an armchair in a nondescript hotel room in Essex.
And yet this is precisely why Tendulkar has proved such a great cricketer. The suffocating intrusions and the expectations of a billion fans must be intolerable; indeed, they have often been survivable only thanks to a phalanx of lathi-wielding policemen who would corral him into cars or on to coaches, away from the outstretched arms of blind worshippers. Tendulkar is in the 20th year of this madness and throughout has remained mentally
stable, professional and decent. Despite all the riches that have come his way, he never lost sight of his job, scoring runs for his country. This is easier said than done. Remember Vinod Kambli, Tendulkar’s fellow schoolboy prodigy, who went off the rails within a few years, never to be seen again. Remember Brian Lara, who was forever riding an emotional rollercoaster. There were times when Lara fell out of love with cricket but that was never the case with Tendulkar. He remained true to his quest for perfection and there were times when he got awfully close.
When the identity of cricket’s all-time greats are discussed, Tendulkar is assured a prominent place in the debate. There are obvious reasons for this. For starters, there’s his unrivalled number of runs in Tests and one-dayers. In the not-too-distant future his combined aggregate in these two forms will top 30,000, an astonishing tally. Then there is the testimony of Sir Donald Bradman, who said Tendulkar’s batting style was the closest to that of Bradman himself, and Shane Warne, who places Tendulkar top of his list of contemporary cricketers.
But is he the greatest batsman of the modern age? Some of us think not and here is why. Watching Tendulkar bat is fascinating but his method is clinical, unemotional and largely predictable. Watching Lara — and bowling to him — wasn’t like this. With Lara, it was always a seat-of-the-pants ride. With Lara, we asked ourselves what would happen next; with Tendulkar we pretty much know. Warne may have been disingenuous when he said Tendulkar was better than Lara, for Lara tore him to shreds more often and to greater effect: Warne experienced defeat by West Indies seven times, by India four times.
Tendulkar coped with the immense burden of mass expectation remarkably well, but to say it did not affect him, or alter the way he played, is nonsense. Tendulkar always played like a man being watched by a billion pairs of eyes — a man conditioned against undue risk-taking. Sunil Gavaskar, the last Indian to hold the world runscoring record, also played like this, as does Rahul Dravid, the third Indian to top 10,000 Test runs. Like Tendulkar, neither of these was a great captain.
It is already being predicted that Tendulkar won’t hold the runscoring record for long. Don’t be so sure. Dravid is older, while Ricky Ponting is 20 months younger but is 1,700 runs behind. Jacques Kallis is a further 500 runs behind but 30 months Tendulkar’s junior. He could be more of a threat but has just had a poor tour of England and is now injured.
Back to the hotel room in Essex. As we parted, Tendulkar asked to see the piece when it was written, an indication of how closely he guards his reputation. I emailed him a copy. He sought several changes, including the removal of the reference to the slippers (it stayed in). He revised his defence of how he played short-pitched bowling to “no comment”, but within months gave a more eloquent reply with two scintillating hundreds in Australia.
