Sir Sachin Tendulkar 4

[Dinesh84]

Mihir Bijur ‏@MihirBijur
Players from the England team urinated on a pitch. Sachin bent to touch a pitch & offer his final respect. The difference. #ThankYouSachin

#ThankYouSachin

[Arvind Srinivasan]

Now that all the dust has settled, I would like to take the opportunity to thank Sachin for all the entertainment for the past 20 odd years of my life. I cannot stop watching cricket , but I am pretty sure it wont be the same for me. The rummaging of the stomach every time you walk in, the expectation, the anxiety , the elation every time you get to a century along with the satisfaction I get from it can never be experienced again. Heck I cant even remember the first time I had a glimpse of you on TV. Thank you and Goodbye SRT......

[littlemaster1982]

A fine balance

The year was 1996, the venue was Edgbaston in Birmingham, and I was there. England won that game by eight wickets, and it was a low-scoring affair, too. However, the reason I, and many others, remember that game is the way Sachin Tendulkar set about the hapless English bowlers in the second innings. On a fourth-innings pitch that offered everything and more to the seamers, and made the ball seam and swing, Sachin single-handedly took the fight out of a marauding Chris Lewis. Of the team score of 219, he made 122. The second highest scorer was Sanjay Manjrekar, with 18.

The discipline and focus required for an innings of such calibre are perhaps at odds with flair and aggression, yet Sachin displayed plenty of both. What struck us all was his complete fearlessness in the face of a hostile bowling attack with blood on their mind, and his refusal to call it a day, even as his fellows departed in a steady procession from the other end. That temperament, I believe, can only belong to someone whose technique makes him well-nigh invincible, should he so choose. It is the approach of someone who has visited, and conquered, weaknesses that have felled many lesser players.

I have seen so much of Sachin over the years that I now find it impossible to pick and choose my 'Sachin moments'. To give a random example, I recall him getting ready to tackle Shane Warne during an Australian tour of India. Conventional wisdom would dictate that Indian batsmen get ready to counter Australian pace, given the state of things, but conventional wisdom would be wrong. What sense does it make to plan for pace when the pitches support spin? Sachin was perhaps the only member of the team who understood that. And he took the trouble to ask Laxman Sivaramakrishnan to bowl at him, round the wicket, into the bowlers' rough. The results are history, cliches be damned.

I remember that practice session largely because it impressed upon me Sachin's unorthodox intelligence. Here was a batsman who had spotted a possible loophole and was working on it. He wasn't going through the motions as many do, no matter how hard they practise. Practice alone does not make you perfect. Only perfect practice makes you perfect. If you're practising the wrong things, you are merely getting better at being wrong. For the greater part of his career, Sachin has displayed this uncanny ability to practise right. And that has translated into footwork that is a coaching manual's joy. If you ignore the bumpy ride of the past year and a half-and you should because that was simply nature doing its job—I have never seen him put a foot wrong. Like a well-trained dancer, Sachin has, time after time, got into the best position to play a shot. That's because, as I was telling British Prime Minister David Cameron recently, you need to get your feet set first. The arms and hands simply follow.

In Sachin's case, the footwork becomes even more important because, like Sunny Gavaskar, he is a small man. And small batsmen take smaller strides when they play forward. If your footwork isn't right, and your step is just about a foot and a half and you are too far away from the pitch of the ball, the outcome can be fatal, not least because you're caught at the crease and rooted to the spot. During his best time, which was pretty much all the time barring the past 18-odd months, I have never seen Sachin caught at the crease. Ever. But those feet have finally stopped moving as well as they should, I feel. And that's what time is all about, isn't it?

The other aspect of Sachin's technique that has always delighted me is his judgement of length. I probably do not need to explain this, but we've seen so many players play back when they should be playing forward, and vice versa, that this bears repetition. Even a player of the calibre of Mahendra Singh Dhoni nicked one to the wicketkeeper during the recent Kolkata Test against the West Indies because he stayed back instead of coming forward. That isn't something you would normally associate with Sachin. The lad just possesses a sublime sense of length. And that's all, really. Footwork and judgement of length. These are, or ought to be, the basics of any good batsman's technique and the beauty of Sachin's game has always been that he has kept things simple.

This is largely what has allowed him to play any kind of bowling on any kind of pitch. This is also what allows him to play those perfect drives, cuts and pulls with minimal expenditure of energy. That economy of movement comes from hours upon hours of dedicated practice, whereby perfectly orthodox technique wins over on-the-spot, sometimes desperate, innovation, every time.

For anyone who cared to notice, Sachin's feet were always aligned wicket to wicket, bat perfectly in line with the off stump, the back-lift enabling the release of the bat and a cocking of the wrists. The fact that he hits with such power can be attributed to the perfect transfer of weight as well as the release of his wrists at the top of his bat swing.

You can also sense that there is a definite plan behind each and every innings, that technique is subservient to Sachin's assessment of the game, and that he isn't using technique simply for the sake of it. While this may not be actually possible, he gives the impression that he has thought every innings through, prepared for every ball, studied every individual bowler, and conducted a personal risk assessment for every shot. All of which make him a game controller, and a game changer on occasion.

There is no shame in the gradual decline that Sachin has been going through. And I completely understand his desire to continue to play. Through all the ups and downs, Sachin Tendulkar has never stopped enjoying himself. And now that he has finally called it a day, the judgement, as usual, is perfect.

______________

Very good technical analysis by Boycott

[littlemaster1982]

Why was it so tough to bowl to Tendulkar?

Picture this: A genuine fast bowler streaming in from the top of his run-up. Tall, big-built, face covered in white paint; his hands and legs moving in rhythm as he gains in pace with every stride. It's a sight that often keeps batsmen awake the night before a Test match, shuddering at the prospect of what they will face the next morning.

Now picture Sachin Tendulkar at the crease. His crouching five-foot-five frame looking even smaller. His bat aligned with the off-stump. His gentle eyes peering from behind the visor. It's a wonder how this benign vision has turned out to be the most fearsome image for bowlers around the world for more than two decades.

What is it that makes Sachin such a huge problem to tackle? How did bowlers approach a match knowing they would come up against his straight drives, his horizontal bat strokes, and his silken flicks? How hard, really, was it to bowl to him?

Waqar Younis, who had famously struck Sachin on the face with a bouncer in the fourth Test of his debut series at Sialkot, says the oft-recounted incident only tells a fraction of the story. "First, I don't think the ball hit him as hard as it's been portrayed. I was bowling at around 145 kmph but it went off the glove before it struck him. He went down, we had a chat, shook hands, and he was up in a minute, ready to play the next delivery," the former Pakistan captain told India Today.

The episode, Waqar says, turned out to be an aberration. The 16-year-old boy they had first heard about from Ajay Jadeja during India's under-19 trip of Pakistan just before the 1989 tour, didn't allow himself to be dominated ever again. "I remember we didn't think too much when we had our first team meeting. There were other important guys to worry about: Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Mohammad Azharuddin, Kapil Dev and Manoj Prabhakar. By the end of the trip, his image within our team had changed entirely."

Over the next few years, as India and Pakistan started playing one-day cricket on a regular basis, all talk in the Pakistani dressing room would be about how to counter Sachin. "We'd realised that if we didn't get him out in his first few overs at the crease, he could do a great deal of damage."

Waqar says that Sachin had no particular chink in his armour to begin with, and his technique got only better with time. "As a fast bowler, you set a batsman up, bowl different deliveries in a pattern, and then induce him into a false shot. Sachin was much better than any other batsman I've bowled to at reading that pattern. But I always felt that more than any other delivery, he was slightly vulnerable to the ball coming into him at good pace early on in his innings."

Allan Donald, another great fast bowler of the 1990s, had heard so much about Sachin's prowess before India's tour of South Africa in 1997 that he turned to West Indies pacemen Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, who had got Sachin out lbw on a few occasions, for help. "Generally fast bowlers don't give away their secrets, but they knew what I was up against, and were nice enough to talk to me about Sachin," he says. Ambrose and Walsh told Donald to bowl fuller and make him play a majority of the deliveries early on in his innings. They said that he just sits pretty at his crease and leaves the balls he doesn't need to touch. "They suggested I bowl full and slanting in from outside the off-stump," says Donald. The ploy worked, but only on occasion, considering that Sachin got a big century in the series. Donald dismissed him just once in three Tests.

As Sachin's career progressed at an astonishing pace around the mid-1990s, the hardest thing was how to prepare against him. Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar, who began his Test career in dramatic fashion by dismissing Rahul Dravid and Sachin off successive deliveries in 1999, says he knew he needed to treat Sachin differently from all other players. "I never sledged him while he batted against me. There are some players who are better off left alone. Players like Sachin will only hit back harder."

Akhtar says he has no qualms in admitting that most of his plans against Sachin fell through. "I would think that if I bowled like this, he will play like that, and then I will stand a chance. At the 2003 World Cup, I tried to bowl short outside the off thinking he would pull me. Instead, he decided to cut me over point for six. It was a shot that made me famous," Shoaib laughs. "Then I decided to bowl at his body, and he flicked me away. I bowled full to him and reversed the ball, he drove straight." That's how he unsettled most bowlers.

Javagal Srinath, who has bowled to Sachin perhaps more than any other bowler in the nets and in domestic cricket, says the only preparation you could do against Sachin was to ensure your mind was always ticking. If you had a set plan, he would always outsmart you. If you didn't have a counter, he would run away with the game. "From my experience, I can remember only Fanie de Villiers, the South African fast bowler, who could think one step ahead of Sachin and beat him regularly," Srinath says.

The Indian quick, who shared the dressing room with Sachin for more than a decade, says Sachin knew the bowlers' tricks so well that he would keeping telling batsman at the other end what the bowler would do next. "He would say, 'Ab yeh upar dalega (Now he will pitch it up)' or 'Thoda chota marega (The next one will be a little short)'. He would be right 90 per cent of the time," says Srinath.

There is no doubt that Sachin had his flaws. But it was his ability to iron them out that kept him one step ahead. During India's tour of Australia in 2003-04, he offered the ultimate example of this quality by scoring 241 runs in Sydney by cutting out the cover-drive completely from his repertoire. That's what the art of batting is all about-playing to your strengths and minimising your weaknesses. That's what let a tiny little man tower over the world of cricket for as long as Sachin has done.

___________

Another good one!

[venkkiram]

Why was it so tough to bowl to Tendulkar?

Javagal Srinath, who has bowled to Sachin perhaps more than any other bowler in the nets and in domestic cricket, says the only preparation you could do against Sachin was to ensure your mind was always ticking. If you had a set plan, he would always outsmart you. If you didn't have a counter, he would run away with the game. "From my experience, I can remember only Fanie de Villiers, the South African fast bowler, who could think one step ahead of Sachin and beat him regularly," Srinath says.

Javagal Srinath, who has bowled to Sachin perhaps more than any other bowler in the nets and in domestic cricket, says the only preparation you could do against Sachin was to ensure your mind was always ticking. If you had a set plan, he would always outsmart you. If you didn't have a counter, he would run away with the game. "From my experience, I can remember only Fanie de Villiers, the South African fast bowler, who could think one step ahead of Sachin and beat him regularly," Srinath says.

இரு தினங்களுக்கு முன்பு இதையே நானும் நினைத்துக் கொண்டிருந்தேன். டிவிலியர்ஸ் ஒரு வானவில் போல. வந்ததும் தெரியாது. போனதும் தெரியாது. ஆனால் விளையாடிய சில வருடங்களிலேயே பத்து வீச்சிற்கே ஒரு தனி இலக்கணமாய் தெரிந்தார்.

He openly says here that http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine...ry/531388.html ( I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article)

I reckon I was the best in the world with that offcutter. Without slowing it down. It went whirrrr. And it worked like a bomb. I took a lot of wickets in England with offcutters. Grassy wicket, bowl offcutters. We had a game here where the West Indian A side had nine left-handers. I took eight of the nine. I could have used that more if we had played a lot of Test cricket in India

County cricket taught me how to bowl the offcutter, which is what you should bowl to Tendulkar all the time. I am not talking slower balls - the fast offcutters.

[VinodKumar's]

Thanks Sachin for all your memories.

My pick of whole Sachin's career is his century against Aus at Sharjha .

[venkkiram]

Thanks Sachin for all your memories.

My pick of whole Sachin's career is his century against Aus at Sharjha .

To me, 114 v Australia, Perth, 1992 and 136 v Pakistan, Chennai, 1999 are the two best test knocks from Sachin because IMO, these were two occasions Sachin had a terrible bowling line up from opponents. I also rate his first double century for Mumbai against Australia as one of the finest.

[VinodKumar's]

I always feel that each and every run in those two Sharjha innings came at will. Intha ball-la inga run adipaan da appdinu sollitu adicha maari irrukum. Dominance at its best .

[Russellffj]

Not to forget Tony Greig's commentary..

http://www.youtube.com/v/x141nJaVijg

What a six what a six... what a player

[littlemaster1982]

Sreedhar Pillai ‏@sri50

#Sachin200 has emerged as the highest rated (TRP') Test match on television (Star Sports) in India in the past 8 years. WOW