Sachin Tendulkar in Bradmanesque form this year
Some 5 decades ago Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon. A few years before that, Stephen Fleming invented penicillin.
The 20th century gave us Einstein, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. It gave us Maradona and Donald Bradman, it gave us Ayrton Senna, Pete Sampras and while many had thought that God would probably decide that these are just enough men to last a century,
there was one little surprise that God still had in store for us.
As the saying goes, all good things come in small Packages, God gave mankind Sachin Tendulkar.
While many had thought that Bradman was the epitome of cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, was born to prove these very critics wrong. With every passing day, he seems to be improving and his 20 years of cricket have been an absolute delight for all cricket fans.
The fact that he has amassed 95 centuries in International cricket to the fact that he has now scored in excess 31000 international runs, to the fact that he is nearing his 40’s with every passing day, to the fact that his Test average this year has been
a phenomenal 93.61 is just mind baffling.
Cricket writers often argue that statistics are never the truest reflection of a players potential and rightly so. However, for this one particular man his statistics alone are testimony to his sheer brilliance.
When Sachin Tendulkar first wore the colours of India, the Berlin Wall was taken down just a week earlier and Nelson Mandela was still doing his time behind bars. http://www.senore.com/Cricket/India-c750 was known as a timid country with a soft corner for socialism, boasting squalid slums,
extreme poverty and timid batsmen.
At the age of 16 Sachin Tendulkar was bracing himself to shake the very pillars of Indian cricket. He surely did that and in the last twenty years has established himself second only to the great Donald Bradman. His sheer resilience has been recognized by
the International Cricket Council, who have, awarded him the ICC player of the year for 2010.
The true majesty of this player can be summed up simply in a nutshell. The great Sir Donald Bradman watching Sachin bat one day said to his wife, “Come and have a look at this. This guy bats like me”.
However the very thing that sets this man apart from the others is the fact that India is a nation of 1 billion people with unreasonably high expectations from their cricketers and he has somehow magically managed to live up to them, consistently for the
last 2 decades.
This man is unarguably the Tiger http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Woods-c98113 of the cricketing World and there are without a doubt very few men amongst his contemporaries, who can even match the records that he has set for them. Breaking the 200 run barrier in ODI’s, he became the first man
in over 40 years of the game to achieve that milestone.
Scoring 6 centuries, which includes a double century along with 4 half centuries, this man has still man seems to be aging backwards. Critics might argue that Tendulkar at times loses his wicket rather cheaply. However, never has it happened that he got
out playing an ugly stroke.
His defence seems to be hand crafted by the very architects of the game of cricket and while Viv Richards could tear the opposition apart with extreme brutality and Lara would unravel his majestic strokes, Sachin Tendulkar does it all with divine simplicity.
In the words of a cricket fanatic, “Right from the beginning, he appeared to be touched by divinity. He came among us as a boy-god, unannounced. He was 16 and was hit on the head in his first appearance, but neither flinched nor retreated a step. Nothing
thenceforth could harm him, temporal or otherwise. He was short and stocky - like all the best - and mop-topped and guileless to behold. He has scarcely changed since”.
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