COMMENT – Every religion has its heretics. Remarkable as it may seem after 22 years and 32,700 international runs there are plenty of people in India who do not believe in Sachin Tendulkar.
To understand why you have to go back 12 years to the first Test against Pakistan at Chennai. That game, the first Test between the two countries in nine years, was played out in a much more fervidly nationalistic atmosphere than this World Cup semi-final. India needed 271 to win.
They were 18 runs away and Tendulkar was on 136. And then he hit a catch to mid-off. India lost by 12 runs. Ever since then the sceptics have reckoned that Tendulkar is a great player who has tended to fail on the great occasions. In the clutch he crumbles – just as in the 2003 World Cup final, when he was caught and bowled in the first over of India’s reply by Glenn McGrath. Or so they say.
He averages 55 in one-day tournament finals but the perception has overwhelmed the reality. In this World Cup he has scored two of the sweetest centuries the competition has ever seen, 111 against South Africa and 120 against England. India did not win either match. The 85 he made here was, in comparison with those masterpieces, pure hack work.
After watching one cuffed drive into the covers, one of the elder sages of the press box leant over and whispered “that was just like watching Vic Marks bat”. He had five lives, each earned by a dropped catch, was reprieved by the third umpire after being given out leg-before to a ball that would just have slid past leg stump, and the very next ball came within a toenail of being out stumped after being bamboozled by Saeed Ajmal’s doosra.
Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan captain, seemed to go through all five of the stages of grief. Denial as he patted Misbah-ul-Haq on the bum after he dropped the ball at midwicket. Anger as he ran his fingers through his hair when Younus Khan fluffed one at extra cover. Bargaining with the umpires over those referrals. Depression when Kamran Akmal let an edge fly by his gloves, and finally meek acceptance when Umar Akmal spilled a final chance at mid-off.
Finally Tendulkar hit the ball to Afridi who took the catch just in time to save his sanity. The innings lacked style but it had substance. At the age of 37 Tendulkar is running out of time to prove those doubters wrong. This was the most important and high-pressure match of his career – or at least the most important and high pressure match of his career until this coming Saturday.
It could only have been nerves that made him play that way. Anyone who wonders just how intimidating the pressure created by a 28,000-strong crowd can be should look at the grovelling apology the ICC issued to “every single Indian fan” after one of its employees made the mistake of stamping on a balloon that had the Indian tricolour on it. It was, the ICC said, “unacceptable behaviour”.
Crisis adverted. Perhaps it was a similar sense of the looming pressure that led the judges to give Tendulkar the man-of-the-match award. Pakistan’s Wahab Riaz was the only player on either side who came close to mastering the conditions, though his team lost. The tied match against England was the most viewed ODI in history.
The figures are still being calculated but there is no doubt that this game will have broken that record. And there is no doubt that it will be broken again in the final. Certainly enough people were watching for the TV broadcasters to get away with charging £25,000 for a 10-second advertising slot.
The estimates, for what they are worth, put the audience somewhere up around the billion mark, over a quarter as large again as the number who watched the last football World Cup final. Each and every one of those 85 runs was a rebuttal to those who say he cannot do it when it really counts. Now he will have to do it again, in a World Cup final, in front of his home crowd in Mumbai.
He needs one more century to become the first man to have scored 100 hundreds in international cricket. Do not even dare to dream it. Pakistan have been denied their fairytale ending but there should be no repeat of the ugly scenes that met them when they flew home after losing to India in the quarter-finals in 1996. Back then Wasim Akram’s house was attacked and the team’s flight had to be diverted from Lahore to Karachi to avoid a furious crowd.
They are in the middle of a never-ending tour and have had two months off in the last 24. After everything they have been through in the past year this was an extraordinary campaign and they have done their country proud in every respect – apart from their catching.
