From The Vault: - The Tendulkar Caper at Hyderabad

The name of Sachin Tendulkar is not just another name. It’s a name that evokes different feelings for different people. For an opposition fielding and bowling line-ups, his entry evoked fear, circumspection and on occasions, a sudden call to attention for the bowlers. For his own team and the batsman at the other end, it gave them the best seat in the house to watch a master craftsman create a new work of art. For the fans in the stadium and the hundreds of millions other who watched him on a television set or were listening in on their radio sets, his entry would make them switch off their lives, so said BBC Sports about him. On 5^th November 2009, just days before he completed 20 years of his international career, he added another legendary knock in his overflowing collection of legendary knocks against an opposition he loved to face, while trying to execute another major heist.

For those who probably have lost the context of what was happening on 5^th November 2009, Australia was on a tour of India to play a 7-match ODI series and with the series tied at 2-2 after 4 games, the 5^th game at Hyderabad was extremely critical for both the sides to establish a foothold in the series. On a pitch that would’ve made a highways contractor proud, Australia chose to bat first and then went on to score 350/4 courtesy a maiden hundred for Shaun Marsh and in reply, the Indians had subsided to 164/4 in 24 overs.

It was the 90s show all over again at this stage for India, as only one man had somehow kept India afloat in this chase. Sachin Tendulkar at that stage was no longer the sprightly teenager that had taken the cricketing world by storm. He was now approaching the 37^th year of his life, was on the verge of completing 20 years of an extraordinary international career. He had suffered countless injuries and his hair had started to grey in a metaphorical sense. But if the last couple of years had to be seen, then this Sachin despite injuries and time having taken their toll, he was still one of the sharpest cats around. To give this a slightly philosophical twist, the hunter may have grown older, but his tools for hunting had evolved. He had started scratchily but once he crossed the milestone of 17,000 ODI runs when he got to a score of 9, he started upping the tempo of his scoring, finding boundaries with increasing regularity across all parts of the grounds. With Suresh Raina offering good support at the other end, Sachin started to take the attack to the opposition, increasingly resembling the Sachin of yore, the intentions of which were affirmed with back-to-back sixes off the off-spinner Nathan Hauritz, which were belted over his head straight down the ground, as if serving Australia a throwback of what he did to Shane Warne a decade ago. With each boundary being scored, Australia’s worries were getting exacerbated and once Sachin got past his 45^th century, the Aussies could have been forgiven if they weren’t being reminded of the Desert Storm innings of Sharjah, when Sachin was confronted with similar circumstances. With the 36-year-old Sachin increasingly bearing resemblance to the Sachin of ’98, Raina started showing his wares and got into the groove with a few of his trademark shovels over mid-wicket and cover coming to good effect and helping him to a half-century of his own. This partnership started to bear an eerie resemblance to the Tendulkar-Nayan Mongia of the Chennai Test of ’99 against Pakistan, where, from being placed at 82/5 in a tricky fourth-innings chase of 271, the pair had staged a recovery. A repeat of that performance was being displayed 10 years later, when after reaching a run-a-ball 59, Raina top-edged a pull off Shane Watson to be caught behind and then India were further pegged back in the same over when Harbhajan Singh too was sent back to the pavilion early.

Thus emerged a young Ravindra Jadeja and just like in Chennai a decade earlier, where left-arm spinner Sunil Joshi emerged to play a quick hand to aid Sachin, Jadeja too set about getting vital boundaries with Sachin starting to slow down and getting edgy with a lack of singles coming his way. Slowly, the equation was brought down to 19 runs needed in the last 3 overs and then tragedy struck. As if the Chennai ’99 was being replayed again, Sachin, in a bid to take advantage of the fine-leg being placed inside the 30-yard circle, decided to scoop debutant pacer Clint McKay over the fielder, but the slowness of the delivery meant that Sachin had to manufacture pace and handed an easy catch to the fielder, to be dismissed for an eye-popping 175 off 141 deliveries and the crowd was silenced at the sight of Sachin falling so close to the finish line yet again. The silence gave way to a massive standing ovation from the crowd, which was packed to the rafters at Hyderabad, and a prayer would’ve surely gone up from every one of them that “Please, don’t give us a Chennai ’99 once again”.

Unfortunately, as was the case with that test match and almost every India game of that decade, where Sachin’s dismissal would trigger an avalanche of Indian wickets, a decade later, the Indian team returned to those roots, as they choked yet again, with Ravindra Jadeja showing the first signs of his batting brain fade, which was to disastrously repeated 8 years later in the 2017 Champions Trophy final, by getting himself run-out when the need was for him to take the chase through and then Ashish Nehra too came and went like passing thoughts, off Doug Bollinger. Yet Praveen Kumar, somehow kept India within a shout of a victory with a massive six over long-off from Doug Bollinger in the penultimate over, which trimmed the deficit to 8 runs needed in the last over, which Shane Watson took the responsibility to bowl, in a continuation of his stupendous work with the ball. Unfortunately for India and for Sachin, the wounds inflicted by Chennai ’99 were reopened afresh when Praveen Kumar was run-out on the fourth ball of the over, leaving India short by 3 runs.

Yes, India and Sachin may have fallen short once again, yes, the Sachin baiters would’ve derived great pleasure in once again criticising him for not seeing the game over the finishing line, but this innings delivered an important lesson for everyone: Age is just a number for a great man, if that man is ready to adapt to the changing times and Sachin just showed that he may have turned 36 years old, but his mind and his spirit was still as young as that 16-year-old teenager that took to international cricket like a duck to water and reminded a generation of cricket fans of the mastery that a Tendulkar innings carries and the emotion that he generates in people across all age groups.