Making History

Why Sachin Tendulkar is so special ?

We are a nation that goes hysterical about milestones. One reason may be that Indians don’t set many. Sachin Tendulkar is an exception and we, a cricket-crazy country, have toasted every single achievement of his. Sachin reached yet another milestone on Friday when he became the highest scorer of runs in Test cricket. He now has the highest aggregate of runs scored in both Test and one-day cricket. That’s a unique record that will remain hard to challenge well into the future. He also holds the record of having the highest number of centuries in all formats of international cricket. Twenty20 has too short a history to be treated on par with Tests and one-day games. Never has a single cricketer held all these records at the same time. Of his contemporaries, Ricky Ponting has the best chance of matching Sachin’s achievements in Tests. The Aussie captain may get to go past Sachin’s runs tally in Tests and his 39 Test hundreds. But, at 34, Ponting is unlikely to overtake Sachin’s records in one-dayers. Sachin, just a year older than Ponting, has over 16,000 runs and 42 centuries in one-day matches. That’s 5,000 runs and 16 hundreds more than Ponting’s. These bits of statistics reveal why Sachin is not just considered among the greats of all time but also the most complete batsman of his time. Is statistics the only reason why Sachin is a unique cricketer? Hardly. He would have been called a great even if these milestones had not been achieved. His stroke play and inventiveness on the cricket field have a lot in common with legends like Gary Sobers and Viv Richards. These cricketers were not mere match-winners but influential personalities who stamped their genius on the game. Brian Lara, whose record Sachin breasted on Friday, could match Sachin stroke for stroke. The comparison ends there. Lara did not have to carry the hopes of a billion people on his shoulders. Sachin has been not just the premier batsman of his team but its chief mentor and motivator. As his first captain K Srikkanth remarked, he has taken the field for 19 years with the same enthusiasm that he first displayed as a 16-year-old debutant in Pakistan in 1989. In many ways, Sachin built on the legacy of Sunil Gavaskar who changed the way Indians played cricket and the way the world saw Indian cricket. Both represented the spirit of their times. If Gavaskar was a representative of pre-liberalisation India, cautious and circumspect in its dealings with the world, Sachin came to symbolise the India of the 1990s, assertive and aggressive in intent and willing to take on the world. There is every reason to celebrate Sachin.