Sir Sachin Tendulkar - The Greatest Cricketer Ever

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India will need Tendulkar for next 2-3 years: Srikkanth

Posted: Oct 17, 2008 at 1716 hrs IST
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Chairman of Selectors Srikkanth said that Sachin Tendulkar still has a lot of cricket left in him.Chairman of Selectors Srikkanth said that Sachin Tendulkar still has a lot of cricket left in him.

Chairman of Selectors Srikkanth said that Sachin Tendulkar still has a lot of cricket left in him.
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Mohali, October 17: : Sachin Tendulkar still has a lot of Cricket left in him and India will need him for the next 2-3 years to guide the youngsters in the team which is ‘in the transitional phase’, Chairman of Selectors Krishnamachari Srikkanth said.

"He should play cricket for another 2-3 years. We need him as the team is going through a transition phase. He is a fantastic team man, very involved cricketer and we need him so that he is able to guide cricketers of future," Srikkanth said after Tendulkar became the highest run-getter in Test cricket.

The master batsman on Friday surpassed Brian Lara's earlier record 11953 runs in the second Test against Australia at PCA grounds in Mohali.

Heaping praise on Tendulkar, Srikkanth said when youngsters make it to the team in near future ‘we would need somebody like Sachin to be there to guide them’.

hi stan, :D
nice to see u back.
flooded with so much information about sachin. Yes, Chennai would have been fabulous for this record. :D

The perfect stance

The Billion expectations

Snap of Shots - 1

Snap of shots - 2

Sridhar Upload any of them in the first page.

Gavaskar on sachin

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081019/jsp/sports/story_9989012.jsp

Adjustment more important than perfection, says Sachin
- ‘If you respect cricket, the game will take you everywhere’
LOKENDRA PRATAP SAHI
A TELEGRAPH EXCLUSIVE
Sachin Tendulkar

Chandigarh: Sachin Tendulkar didn’t wake up feeling any different, on Saturday, but the country continues to toast Test cricket’s No. 1 run-getter.

Sachin has always been pressed for time and the demands have got more after he eclipsed Brian Lara’s record. Late on Friday, though, he found some time to speak to The Telegraph at the Taj.

The following are excerpts

Q After such an exhaustive media conference, there’s little left to ask... However, is perfection possible?

A Look, you can always try and get close to being perfect... But I’d say that perfection isn’t everything... I know of players who haven’t been absolutely correct, or perfect, technically, but have still been able to adjust to the demands of big-time cricket... For me, then, adjustment is more important than perfection.

What about excellence?

It can be achieved, yes... It won’t come on a platter, though.

After almost 19 years, what are your memories of your Test debut in Karachi?

It’s all a blur and it has been that way for quite some time and not related to everything that has been happening after this record... About the only thing I remember is that I was so, so excited to play for India... Remember, I was just 16... Those five days went by so fast... (After a pause) What I also recall is that I’d been tense and nervous while batting.

At the media conference, you spoke of having converted the stones thrown at you into milestones. What exactly did you mean?

(Emotionally) It’s not only about me... I was also thinking of the other seniors (in the present team) when I made that comment... I think people need to show more respect to the seniors... We’ve achieved a certain level because of the sweat and tears we’ve put in and nobody should run us down... We’ve never taken anything for granted... We’ve been committed to our job and, to give a personal example, I’d be very hurt if somebody said and wrote (negative) things about my heroes... I’m so disappointed at what’s being written and said about Anil Kumble... He’s been around for over 18 years and his achievements do all the talking. Should he be subjected to what has been going on?

If anything, the seniors have always tried to raise the bar...

Absolutely... We’ve tried to put up a better performance... Getting better, irrespective of the achievements, has been our driving force.

So, what’s the legacy you’ll be leaving?

That’s not for me to say... If the next generation of cricketers find something that’s useful then they’ll try and do the same thing... It will be for them to say if they found something in me to motivate them.

Your message for young cricketers...

Take to cricket wholeheartedly and respect the game... Indeed, if you respect cricket, the game will take you everywhere. I didn’t take to cricket so that I could do certain things and go to certain places, but the game has done everything for me... I’ve stayed focused and being that would be my advice to others.

The final one: You’re seen as a unifier, among the few Indians whose following cuts across regional and religious lines. Does that, in a different way, add to the pressure?

I consider myself very fortunate that I’m able to bring people together... I stay the way I am 24x7... I don’t make an effort to do anything special, don’t try and change my behaviour... If I am a role model, it’s because people have appreciated the things I’ve done and, yes, I’m grateful to them. I guess I’ve been blessed.
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The world’s best batsman?
Sachin Tendulkar became the top runscorer in Test history last week, but how does he compare with the rest. SIMON WILDE attempts to find out


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, highpitched voice, Tendulkar spoke for the best part of an hour about his career and — this view burned 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 shortpitched 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, and 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 unbearable 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 alltime 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 to West Indies seven times, to 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 risktaking. 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. Nor were either of these two, like Tendulkar, great captains.
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 e-mailed 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. The Sunday Times

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A batsman for all ages -- By Saurav Ganguly
Web posted at: 10/18/2008 0:51:55
Source ::: PMG

The first time I saw Sachin was in Kanpur where he had come to play for West Zone in the Vijay Hazare tournament. Obviously, there was huge attention on him as they were touting him to be the next big thing in Indian cricket.

I had not seen him before, but the knock he played against us, gave ample proof that if he had his head in right place, he would dominate international cricket.

He was using an Ihsan bat, which easily could have been a bench press rod for fitness work because of its heavy weight.

It amazed all of us that the man of a short stature could pick up such a heavy bat and still manouvre it. Obiovusly, in future he continued using a heavy bat and still had so much time to play genuine fast bowling.

We went on to be a part of under-17 camp under the great Vasu Paranjpe in Indore and what amazed us how much he loved batting in the nets, for hour after hour.

With time, over the years, by sharing the same dressing room, going through the highs and lows of Indian cricket, he has become a very good friend.

He is still as humble and soft spoken as he used to be and so keen and childish in narrating his childhood stories to the team-mates – whether batting for 54 days in a row in different matches when he was 14 years old and the way his coach Mr Ramakant Achrekar used to take him on his scooter around the maidans (grounds) of Mumbai.

I see no reason to say that he transformed into one of the best batsman of the modern era with hard work. His technique is so simple, yet so solid. What has stood up in his success story is his ability to adjust and change his game according to the situation. At times, I have seen him in Test matches do completely different things in the middle of an innings and asked him a few times that how could he do it straight in a game without even doing it in the nets? That’s why probably he is such a great player.

After being around for 18 years, his hunger for the game has not reduced at all and every time I see him walking out to play Test match as if he is play his first game.

I have been fortunate enough to witness some of his best Test and one-day knocks.

To my mind his best Test innings is the hundred he scored at Perth in 1992 during the tour of Australia 18 years ago.

His best one-day inning innings would be the hundred against Australia at Sharjah and also the innings of 97 against Pakistan at Centurion in the 2003 World Cup.

He has never been a fitness fanatic in an era where training is such an important criteria.

He never believed in all these and would always be spending his energy and time in harnessing his cricket skills rather than lapse around the park. He considers bowling in the nets is the way to keep him fit and that also is one of the reasons he has survived 18 years. In recent times, obviously, his body has broken down a few times, but I still feel he has got good two to three years of international cricket left in him. For the good of Indian cricket, we all hope that he continues to fire as long as he plays.

To us, he will not just be remembered as a great player and lovely human being, but also as somebody who has been trying to learn Bengali for the last fourteen years: unfortuntaley, he has never managed to do that.

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/maga...ppertype=print

Beyond legendary

He has played for two decades, carrying the hopes of a nation, and done it with grace and class. Tendulkar has transcended every other cricket hero there is

October 18, 2008

This is the first in a new series where Kumar Sangakkara looks at his favourite contemporary players.



Out of this world but down to earth: part of Tendulkar's greatness is how he has stayed humble and unassuming all through © AFP

As an international cricketer of the current generation, the Tendulkar era, I will always have one striking memory of Sachin that will be forever etched in my mind: his thrilling entrance onto a cricket field. The anticipation of him emerging from the pavilion, and his walk from the boundary to the centre, is almost surreal. The sound of a passionate Indian crowd all chanting "Sachin, Sachin" as they wait in anticipation, followed by the enormous roar when he emerges onto the field, is electrifying.

That experience also tells you much about Sachin and his special place in the game's history. He is not just the finest and most complete batsman of the past two decades. In a country that is cricket-mad, where players are deified and worshipped, he stands out and stands alone. In a continent of cricketing legends of the calibre of Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev, and in a tradition of cricket that has produced other great heroes, Sachin seems to have transcended all of them and achieved a revered, almost superhuman, stature.

I remember playing in a charity game in 2003 at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. Thousands of people turned out to watch the match and the familiar chant filled the ground as he walked out to take strike with Virender Sehwag. However, two overs later, Sachin's dismissal was followed by pin-drop silence. As he left the field, the only sound was the murmur of the dispersing crowd. For me, that kind of pressure every single day, and the lack of a truly private life, would, I believe, prove too much.

But Sachin, somehow, has taken it in his stride for an incredible 20 years almost. To my mind that ranks as a higher achievement than the long lists of statistical records he has claimed. Playing for India is no easy task. The pressure to perform in every single outing, to win every single match, is tremendous. Magnify that a thousand-fold and that is what Sachin has to deal with.

He may have millions of fans, but he has his share of critics as well. Many times over the years India has failed to convert an appearance in a final into a win, and when this happens the first barbs of criticisms are invariably aimed at one man. "Sachin," they say, "does not win India finals." The man who has been rewriting the record books has been judged by some to have failed India in some crucial games that everyone seems to remember and talk about.

This criticism is totally unfounded and unfair. Sachin is extremely strong mentally. You have to be, to last 20 years at the top. That he is still able to carve out match-winning performances now, despite all the injuries and the physical and mental overload that comes with being a top-flight international cricketer, is testament to his mental toughness. India have not lost so many finals because of Tendulkar; they have lost because of poor team performances.

Therein lies the danger of having individual brilliance in your cricket team. Many are the times I have sat in the dressing room, watching Sanath Jayasuriya single-handedly win matches. However, without realising it, we reached the stage, at one point, where our whole confidence hinged on the rise and fall of Sanath. His early dismissal would sow seeds of doubt, and his continued presence in the middle would fuel confidence. We have succeeded now in breaking free of that dependence. It is a similar battle that India have fought with Sachin.

I first watched Sachin on TV when I was 12 years old, and for me the most striking thing about his batting has been its beautiful simplicity. The picture-perfect stance; the straight, measured back-lift; the neat forward-defensive and the checked-drive have changed little over the years. Of course, he was blessed with enormous natural talent, but that talent has been fulfilled because of a rock-solid technical foundation.



That he is still able to carve out match-winning performances now, despite all the injuries and the physical and mental overload that comes with being a top-flight international cricketer, is testament to his mental toughness. India have not lost so many one-day finals because of Tendulkar; they have lost because of poor team performances



His simple technique has helped him adapt to, and dominate, all formats of the game under all conditions. Use Cricinfo's Statsguru to assess his overall record and you can only marvel at the completeness of his career. He has scored runs in every cricketing country, on every type of pitch, against every bowling attack. Furthermore, his dominance extends from Test cricket to one-day cricket, and even to the newest format, the Twenty20 game.

Various teams have used different tactics against him over the years, probing his technique to find weaknesses. However, even if they did find any, he was always able to adapt and evolve his game to overcome the challenge. That is what great players do. To my mind, his only obvious weak spot has been against the ball that nips back in from outside off stump - a delivery that troubles several of India's batsmen, though for different reasons.

Since 2003, life does seem to have become tougher for Sachin, mainly because of injuries and the physical toll of the international treadmill. I sense that this - especially the injuries - has introduced a more cautious attitude to his batting. Which is why the appearance of Sachin today does not bring with it a cloud of doom for the fielding team, as it used to do. His increased conservatism has dulled his threat, although he remains very capable of compiling match-winning scores.

Despite his great achievements Sachin has managed to stay an unassuming, humble and very approachable human being. He is a family man whose life is steeped in good moral and religious values. His interaction with players, both in his own team and in the opposition, has given many a cricketer a humbling insight into the mind of this genius. He is always ready to accommodate his fellow cricketers in conversations that might range from cricket to his family, food, travel, and his two other passions: cars and watches.

This is all revealing because it helps explain where he gets his mental strength from. His simple private life, his clear values and strong ethics, and a very good support system in terms of his family and close friends, have given him the foundation and strength to be able to shoulder the hopes and expectations of millions. Underpinning him is a natural zest for life, a passion for cricket and also for humanity. To me, he is the embodiment of the gentleman cricketer. He does not need aggressive rhetoric or psychological battles to prove his worth. He has his bat and he lets it do the talking.

© Cricinfo

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Originally Posted by Vivasaayi

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Originally Posted by selvakumar

Sachin :thumbsup: :D :bluejump:
Vaanavedikkai, saravedinnu ground ae ninnuchu - unakku mattumthaan :smokesmirk:

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ada yenga...mohali oru mattamana ground for making this record...very sparse crowd

imagnie the atmosphere in mumbai or chennai...chumma stadiume konja neram aadeerukkum

as sangakara has said in his recent article

"I will always have one striking memory of Sachin that will be forever etched in my mind: his thrilling entrance onto a cricket field. The anticipation of him emerging from the pavilion, and his walk from the boundary to the centre, is almost surreal. The sound of a passionate Indian crowd all chanting "Sachin, Sachin" as they wait in anticipation, followed by the enormous roar when he emerges onto the field, is electrifying. "

what true words...his persona..the electrifying atmosphere when he enter the field... priceless :clap: matchless hero :notworthy:

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Sachin's Glorious career in Images