Sport

He is still the one

“Oh, no, not again Sachin!”

It is a strange irony of sport that a cricketer who has, arguably, provided fans a far greater share of their memorable sporting moments than anyone else in the entire history of Indian cricket should, conversely, also have been responsible for countless moments of great disappointment.

On Thursday night, a sublime, match-winning 97 by Sachin Tendulkar was, for many, nothing more than yet another disastrous ending in the nervous nineties. Moreover, a pattern of ‘failures’ has been detected — six successive dismissals in the nineties.

Nervous? After 18 full years in the cauldron, after 41 ODI hundreds and 37 Test centuries, after scoring over 27,000 runs in international cricket? That’s a bit like Edmund Hillary developing summit sickness on the descent from Mount Everest.

When lofty heights are a player’s customary altitude, it is ludicrous to imagine that he would suddenly start freezing in sight of the so-called magic figure of 100. And, in the context of the Gwalior match itself, how superior could 100 have been to 97? It would have been about as superior as 103 might have been to 100.

This apart, we don’t need to employ the late science fiction writer Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Generator to come to terms with a sequence of six dismissals in the nineties. Sport makes room for all sorts of accidents.

The point is, when it comes to Sachin, we always find a way to complain. Nothing is ever good enough. Of course, the little man — almost obscenely talented — has to take part of the blame for that.

When he busily got all those hundreds, in hushed tones we debated their merit from the team’s point of view. How many times did India win when Sachin scored a century?

Now, after a series of nineties, the question, strangely enough, has nothing to do with India’s wins and losses. It has to do with Sachin himself. The old boy has lost his nerve, hasn’t he?

Nobody talks about match-winning nineties. And that has a lot to do with our all-too-human obsession with round numbers. It is our evolutionary excess baggage. Quite often, regular gym users tend to feel that they have not worked out at all if they happened to have stepped off the treadmill a fraction of a minute short of a nice and round 30.

Then again, the unbroken sequence of Sachin-inspired highs and lows began a long time ago. He emerged at a time when cricket’s ascendancy as India’s only sporting religion was becoming increasingly obvious.

Those of us who have left behind a lot of summers would know that children born around the time we first heard that lament — Oh, no, not again Sachin — or when we first celebrated his genius, might today be old enough to apply for a driver’s licence.

For far too long, cricket fans in this country have depended on one individual to keep the feel-good mercury soaring. And it never quite soars as high as when Sachin makes a century. For, surely, our serotonin levels shoot up when the little man gets going.

Those three-figure knocks not only helped with the feel-good business but, more importantly, seemed to give us the confidence that we too can take on the world, especially in an alien world away from our little world (India). This is the reason why Sachin’s successes have meant as much — or more — to the Indian diaspora as they have to fans at home.

In popular perception, Sachin was a measure of India’s greatness long before nine per cent GDP growth rates and the stock market boom, long before Lakshmi Mittal and Infosys, Viswanathan Anand and Indian F-1 teams. Few Indians did as much for as long to help us feel secure in our identities.

And, long after the advent of the World Wide Web, long after the hirsute entry of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, well after the Twenty20 glory, there still is Sachin Tendulkar.

But, don’t take that for granted. There will soon come a day when he’ll be gone, and Indian cricket, as well as our cultural discourse, will never be the same again.

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