Tendulkar cannot be sixteen forever

Watching Sachin Tendulkar weave, duck, and barely survive against the hostile attack of Andrew Flintoff, Simon Jones and Mathew Hoggard at Lord’s recently brought back vivid memories to me of his batting from the Test played against Pakistan at Sialkot in 1989.
The battle was red hot when Tendulkar, only 16 years old and in his first international series, was at the crease.Waqar Younis was the bowler. Suddenly, Tendulkar found his pretty nose the target of a vicious snorter that lifted from just short of a length and made evasive action impossible.
Blood fell on to the pitch as the batsman hobbled around in pain, his hand holding up the shattered nose. The shrewd Imran Khan feigned indifference. He wanted play to resume in a hurry, to put the young batsman under further pressure, to win the last Test after three draws. This seemed to spark vigorous defiance in Tendulkar. He quickly shrugged off medical assistance and resettled in his stance, the head still but eyes smouldering.
Waqar, who in those days ran in a mile and more, steamed in like a superfast train and hurled another thunderbolt. Even before he could complete his follow through, the ball had screamed past cover and into the pickets. Tendulkar’s bravado had ensured that India would not be subjugated.
It is such brazen aggression that has played such a pivotal role in establishing the legend. The Tendulkar brand of batsmanship is renowned for blatant and exciting run-making, awe-inspiring counter-attacking and, of course, astonishing consistency without which his class could never be ratified. But in recent months, all these wonderful attributes have come under harsh scrutiny, even leading to searching questions about his greatness. At Lord’s, during the first Test, this was clearly the case. Has he lost his fizz, was buzzing amongst critics.
All scrutiny is legitimate for the reasoning mind, and doubtless some of the wonderfully exciting features of Tendulkar’s cricket have undergone change over the past couple of years. But does that diminish his greatness as a batsman, I wonder.
There is a tendency to see everything from the prism of statistics, which can demean not only the game, also its art and craft. Too many accomplished players — past and present — swear by Tendulkar’s outstanding ability, and none of them is known to be a case for the mental asylum. That leaves the aspect of his current approach to batting open to debate.
Tendulkar runs into a huge problem here too. Everybody still believes he is, and wants him to be, the Boy Wonder: a swashbuckling 16 or 18-year-old willing to take on all comers anywhere in smashing style, with uninterrupted success. That’s a fantastically romantic notion, reinforced undoubtedly by the misleading magic of television replays.
In fact Tendulkar is in cricket middle-age, perhaps bone weary, perhaps even jaded after 13 years of non-stop cricket. He has played 97 Tests and 295 One-day internationals, which is a daunting workload though not entirely uncommon in the modern game. But he is seen to be a machine that must deliver every time, and little less than a hundred. This brings in its wake pressures of expectations that can barely be fathomed because of the sheer number of Indians in the world who see in him the symbol for success and salve for all their problems.
The perceptive writer C P Surendran observed a few years ago: ‘‘Batsmen walk out into the middle alone. Not Tendulkar. Everytime Tendulkar walks out to the crease, a whole nation, tatters and all, marches with him to the battle arena. A pauper people pleading for relief, remission from the life-long anxiety of being Indian, by joining in spirit with their visored saviour.’’
What Surendran missed out was Tendulkar’s expectations from himself. For the super performer, success gets hugely internalised. Expectations from the self are always the more demanding and more pressure-laden as Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Bjorn Borg, Michael Schumacher and the like have suggested in various ways, at various times. How that pressure is coped with becomes the crux of the matter, not merely the vicissitudes of form.
Is Sachin Tendulkar still unafraid of failure and still excited by success?