Sachin Tendulkar: victim of his own achievements

Gwalior: Exactly 18 years after making his international debut at Karachi, Sachin Tendulkar batted with the freedom of youth, not weighed down by the past few months. Here was a man with very little left to prove in his career, yet having to reinforce his stature in the one-day side. Here was a man with a calendar-year average of 48.10, with 13 fifties and one hundred, and the second highest run-getter this year after Matthew Hayden, but having his place in the side questioned.

And on Thursday, he scored 97 sublime runs before an inside-edge rattled his stumps. Those runs set the stage for Yuvraj Singh and captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni to take India to a convincing six-wicket win over Pakistan and also clinch the series with one match to be played on Sunday.

There is an explanation to the questions raised over Tendulkar’s inclusion. Tendulkar has been a victim of his own achievements. The more he has succeeded, the more has been demanded from him. Even the smallest failure has been nitpicked at and blown up into a large-scale frailty. Premature obituaries have piled on.

But none of that mattered at Mohali and at Gwalior in this series. The batting was free of pre-innings labels. What rode on it was irrelevant. Mohali began with some difficulty, but what followed was a rush of runs. There was power, precision, balance and ease. The first three were largely contemporary, but the fourth was throwback.

Gwalior was something else. The placid pitch and an equally placid attack offered a perfect platform. Shot after shot was pulled off with astonishing timing. The length was picked right out of the bowler’s hand and the footwork responded quicker to hand him the fate he might not have deserved.

Slow motion replays showed the amount he put his wrists through for the square-leg boundaries. It proved that the essence of his batting had remained tucked away in a corner, protected from disruptive forces. Age, workload, pressure and injuries might have rendered some of his strengths inadequate, but his genius — the essence — has remained.

If only Umar Gul hadn’t singled him out for a sudden fit of accuracy. Gul has a natural in-swinger that can cramp some for room. If Tendulkar wasn’t unfortunate as it was to have found Gul at his rare best in Mohali, he also found Kamran Akmal at his acrobatic redeeming self.

Gwalior was the harder one to accept. Playing a shot that had fetched him plenty, the swing quickly turned fatal, and the bails were off.

There was an uneasy lull in the 30,000-capacity stadium after that, when Yuvraj and Dhoni were constructing the series-win for India. The brilliant innings would go down as a match-winning one.

“What can I say about Sachin?” said Dhoni after the match. “We all felt awful when he got out in the nineties again. But it cannot take away what all he has achieved this year. We all hope and pray that he will get his next hundred soon.”

Tendulkar himself had a wry smile when asked about it. “The important thing is that the team won the series. These things are part and parcel of the game. If I keep thinking about getting out in the nineties, then it will be hard to get the next hundred,” he said.

Hundred No. 41 came in January this year, followed by six missed chances. Numbers and statistics can be cold-blooded. What they record are the dismissals, but what they do not reveal, is the genius that preceded them.