SACHIN TENDULKAR, you would have thought, would not be particularly sensitive to criticism. When you have a record in cricket as good as his, why would he be?
But you would be wrong. A few years ago, when I was granted a one-on-one interview with the great man, within hours he withdrew his responses to questions about his ability against the short ball and suggestions that his powers might be on the wane, even though there was enough evidence to suggest questions on these topics were valid. He had been going through a fallow patch.
I retained the questions and inserted “no comment” into the places where his replies had been, to make clear he had been keen to stifle the debate. This just goes to show that even great men get protective about their reputations as they approach the end of their careers and grow increasingly conscious of what their place in history might be.
So, although he is wise enough to recognise the artificiality of lumping together Tests and one-day internationals to arrive at a total of 100 hundreds for India (almost one-fifth of which came against the minnows of Bangladesh, Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe, including the one which finally took him to the landmark in Dhaka on Friday), it is a record he will certainly be happy to take, five weeks away from his 39th birthday.
Much as the purists might huff and puff, it may even be the statistic by which he is best remembered. Until the inconceivable happens and someone else matches it — if ever they do — it will become cricketing shorthand for 'GOAT': Greatest of All Time.
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Make no mistake, Tendulkar will have cared much about reaching this “milestone”. Why else did it turn into such a hefty millstone, with more than a year elapsing between 99th and 100th hundred? If not quite so spectacularly, he had also stumbled in taking possession of the records for the most Test hundreds (from Sunil Gavaskar in 2005) and most Test runs (from Brian Lara in 2008).
A century of international centuries is testimony to his technical excellence, his endless love of the game, but above all to his versatility. His wicket has for years been the one which every young thruster with a ball in his hand most wanted – whether he was a bowler of pace or bounce, swerve or spin. Never tiring of the challenge, or cowed by the fear of failure, he has fended off wave after wave of them.
It has got to the stage where some of them — such as Australia’s Mitchell Starc, who dismissed him in an ODI last month — were not even born when Tendulkar started playing for India.
Around the time of my interview in 2007, it really looked like the game had finally got the better of him. His body was showing signs of strain: a chronic elbow problem was affecting his technique and state of mind, and he was having problems with the bouncer, something England exploited that summer.
In the space of three years he scored only seven centuries for India, leaving his career tally standing on 78. Lesser players might have taken the plaudits and slipped gratefully into the shadows. Had he done so, there would not be the daylight between him and his nearest rivals that exists now.
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But he found a way back and, with the help of judicious management of his workload, played some of his finest cricket. Despite the tortuous search for his latest three-figure score, he has still scored more international centuries since the start of 2008 than any other player. Not bad for a man in his late thirties.
In truth, he is not quite the player he was. Now that he is free of his burden, he may of course again impose himself on the bowling in the way he used to, but England and Australia will reckon that they know how to bowl to this ageing lion; recent evidence certainly suggests that they do.
These days he is revered as much for his longevity as his talent. People turn up to watch him bat because, rather like Everest and the Pyramids, he is still there to be marvelled at. It is a last chance to see in the flesh one of the all-time greats in action.
Longevity is certainly a key ingredient if someone is to score 100 hundreds in any sphere of the game. Tendulkar has been playing
international cricket for more than 22 years, something managed by only eight others, none of whom was a regular participant in the modern merry-go-round.
Tendulkar has not only played pretty much non-stop since making his Test debut at the age of 16 but averaged almost five hundreds a year since scoring his first for India at Old Trafford 22 years ago. Don Bradman scored centuries for Australia that were 20 years apart and Jack Hobbs’ last Test hundred for England came 19 years after his first, but both their careers were interrupted by world wars.
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Tendulkar has batted more than 760 times for India, which is not far short of the number of innings Viv Richards played in his entire first-class career, during which he scored 114 centuries.
While some of Richards’ first-class hundreds would have come in circumstances lacking the high-pressure environment of an international arena, he would equally have scored hundreds against county attacks significantly stronger than some of the international attacks Tendulkar has plundered. That said, 20 of Tendulkar’s three-figure scores have come against Australia, the strongest team of his era.
If durability has been one rare quality, another is his capacity to remain focused on scoring runs when he might easily have been distracted by his wealth or the quasi-religious fervour of his supporters.
He has done this by forcing himself into an almost zen-like trance — what he describes as willing himself to live in the present rather than past or future, which are more attractive but less helpful states of mind. One of the tricks he uses to achieve this is to make sure he has control of his breathing. Steady breathing is a starting point.
For 20 years, Tendulkar has kept giving his fans what they wanted — not just lots of runs but lots of hundreds, the strongest currency by which Indians could measure their cricket against the world. Even if the team was not doing well, as it wasn’t for most of the 1990s, the public and the marketing men could still feed off the feats of the team’s cherub-faced star.
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Mindful of the detached state in which Tendulkar operates, and his failed term as captain, critics have argued that he has not scored as many match-winning centuries as he should have done, as though he was so wrapped up in his own game that he somehow lacked the vision to grasp the bigger picture.
There is some truth in this, but only some. Tendulkar himself conceded that before his great innings against England at Chennai in 2008 he had been short of hundreds in the fourth innings to win Tests. It was also the case that he did not score a match-winning century in the second innings of an ODI between 2001 and 2008.
But these shortcomings have had less to do with a lack of vision and more to do with a shortfall in stamina (a common Indian failing). In the past 10 years, he has scored far more heavily in the first half of games than the second, averaging 20 more runs in the first innings of a Test compared to the second, and 21 more batting first in an ODI rather than second. These are striking differences.
It is hard to imagine any international player matching Tendulkar. It would require a precociously early start, sustained excellence, freedom from injury and an insatiable appetite for batting. It would also require Test and ODI cricket to survive the onslaught of the Twenty20 format. No one is going to score 100 hundreds playing mainly 20-over slogs.
He should worry less: his place in history is secure. All that remains is to work out an exit strategy, which could come at home to England later this year.