Unlucky Tendlya

On November, 15, 2009 Sachin Tendulkar completed twenty illustrious years in international cricket. The hype and hoopla around the moment was visible and understandable.

Each and every newspaper, tv channel, radio station kept telling us about it. Leander Paes was made to remember that table tennis match he lost to Sachin a few years back, Bishen Singh Bedi decided to be sensible for once and praise the man, Amitabh Bachchan recounted all those occasions when he had to post-pone shoots to watch Sachin bat (really?). So on and so forth.

Did make one wonder, what if Sachin was not an Indian? Or, an Indian, who represented another country? Someone like Venkatraman Ramakrishnan or Dinanath Ramnarine if we were to strictly talk about cricket?

Well, it would have been disastrous for Indian cricket but surely better for Sachin.

Why? Because in that case he would have had the good fortune of playing against Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, Ajit Agarkar, Dodda Ganesh, Abey Kuruvilla, David Johnson and the likes.

In the sixth one-dayer against Australia in Guwahati in the recently concluded seven-match ODI series (The Aussies won that match by six wickets to clinch the series 4-2), Sachin managed to score only 10 runs. But he still had a record against his name. Sachin became the first cricketer to amass 3000 ODI runs against Australia. In fact, he became the first cricketer to score more than 3000 runs in any format against any team in the world. Hopefully he would soon cross the mark against the Aussies in Test cricket too. He’s scored 2748 Test runs against Australia so far and the deficit of 252 runs is a matter of one Test match for an average Sachin and three for an off-colour Sachin.

Now, how many runs would a man score against the Srinath-Prasad-Agarkar combine if he succeeded in scoring close to 6000 international runs against the Mcgrath-Lee-Warne combine? We all know the answer.

Sachin has often been compared to some of his contemporaries (his contemporaries though include everyone from Dean Jones to Callam Fergusson). But while comparing others to Sachin, people conveniently forget that while Brian Charles Lara had the good fortune of playing against Sunil Joshi and Nilesh Kulkarni or conversely, of not playing against Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, Sachin had no such privileges. While Inzamam Ul Haq honed his batting skills against Harvinder Singh and Rahul Sanghvi, Sachin had to sweat it out against those who never bowled to Inzy in international cricket. Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Saqlain Mushtaq and Mushtaq Ahmed. Still, neither Lara nor Inzy managed to score as many international runs.

We all know that Sachin has scored close to 30,000 international runs (by the time this article is published, he in all probabilities would have crossed the 30,000 barrier as India would be playing against Sri Lanka). But I guess what makes this monumental milestone look even more unbelievable is the fact that he scored all those runs without facing a single delivery of Paras Mhambrey or Prashant Vaidya or Bhupinder Singh Senior.

What would have happened if Sachin wasn’t playing for India?

One, he probably would have scored another 30,000 runs against the ‘fearsome’ Indian bowlers.

Two, the Indian media would have had to give more space to Rahul Gandhi and LK advani.