Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar - 'The Master Blaster' , 'The God of Cricket' - All superlatives fail before this man's class.
21st May 1997: A date that has annoyed, irritated or in some cases tormented many a cricket fan. It was on this day that Saeed Anwar broke Viv Richards' record for the highest ever score in a One Day International. The record was thus passed on from a legend of the game to a player who was merely good, but by no stretch extraordinary - Anwar averaged 37.62 against the major nations in ODIs, and away from home his average shrank to 26.70. Then last year, another name joined Anwar at the top of the list: Charles Coventry. Even after he scored 194 not out, a lot of people in a lot of cricketing discussions over lots of beers in lots of pubs, would still be asking: Charles who?
The anomaly at the top of the record charts was begging to be corrected. As my colleague Srivathsa said, he was waiting for this day since that fateful May night almost 13 years ago. He was not alone. There were thousands - millions probably - who felt that the name that belonged at the top of the table was that of Sachin Tendulkar. In what is proving to be a golden twilight of his career, Tendulkar has systematically gone about checking all the un-checked boxes in his cricketing CV. One important one was ticked when he led a mammoth fourth innings chase against England at the same ground that he had failed to complete the job against Pakistan in 1999. Another was accomplished today, with the world's highest ODI score and first ODI double-century. No other name seemed to have belonged so naturally at the top of the list than his.
Until today, Tendulkar had seemed like the logical successor to Viv Richards as the greatest ODI batsman of his generation. Not anymore. He is now undoubtedly, the greatest ODI batsman ever. He has made the great Viv seem like a mere prelude to the real thing.
From the moment he came out to bat and stroked his first boundary to the moment when he raised his arms in triumph, in release, in acknowledgment - he looked like he was batting in a different zone. This is supposed to be a man on his last cricketing legs, but he didn't use a runner for a single minute of his innings and came out to field from the first ball to boot! With Sachin Tendulkar though, what is supposed to be and what is, don't always match.
One man is not supposed to carry the hopes of a nation of a billion every time he walks out to bat. But he does.
One man is not supposed to be the barometer of a country's happiness - he is being thrust with an impossible responsibility. But he is.
A man who makes his debut as an impressionable, precocious 16 year old is not supposed to last for 20 years as an international celebrity and not have any outrageous scandals associated with him.
One man isn't supposed to display a superhuman quality of being human, if he has been granted the superhuman gifts that Sachin Tendulkar has. But he remains so.
A man is supposed to be mortal, to be granted the allowance for errors. But he isn't.
A man is not supposed to retain the same enthusiasm for a sport across more than 20 years, having spent the majority of those years under public scrutiny like no other. But he has.
I thought I had expended all possible superlatives for Sachin Tendulkar, when he completed twenty years in international cricket and I wrote this piece. I forgot, for a moment, that with Sachin Tendulkar superlatives don't ever exhaust themselves. There might come a day when Roget's Thesaurus will fail to find adequate words to describe the man, but he himself will not fail.
As he raised his arms in triumph, a country pumped its collective fist and let out a collective primeval roar. The relief, the sense of accomplishment, and the satisfaction at getting to the landmark was all the more keenly felt because for a long time now, there has been only one man who seemed capable of breaching the 200-run mark in an ODI. Sehwag has also threatened to do that, but Sehwag has never come as close as Sachin has. He made 186 not out against New Zealand at Hyderabad, but that was in an era when 300 was an almost certainly winning score. He then hit 163 not out against New Zealand a year ago, but retired with cramps. And then of course there was that heart-breaking 175 against the Aussies in November last year. Many of us feared that his best shot at the record was gone with the end of that innings. When we, his fans, could not pick ourselves up after that shattering loss, how would he manage to do so?
However, while that loss might have broken lesser men, it seemed to spur Sachin Tendulkar on towards ensuring that such heart-break was never to be experienced again. The next time he came so close, there would be no denying him. And so he battled on. He had hit the ball with unbelievable power, and his hands must have been tiring. He had placed the ball with unbelievable dexterity, and his inventiveness must have been ebbing. He had run every single run with unwavering commitment as hard as he could - his partners' and his own - and his legs must have been sending urgent messages to his brain to let up. But nothing was going to sway him today. There had been too many golden moments snatched from him at the last moment. This one was going to be had.
The final flourish of a golden career is going considerably better than the purple patches of most other batsmen's careers. Two check-boxes remain to be ticked - a Test triple century beckons, but more than that, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar will want to keep his date with destiny on April 2nd 2011 in Mumbai.
Even if those landmarks are not achieved though, India will remain happy. He doesn't require much effort to keep India happy - all he has to do is get hold of a bat and stride out to the middle. And so, years from now, when he has retired, we will be fondly paraphrasing Robert Browning to the next generation and the next: Sachin Tendulkar was in his batting gear and all was right with India.
