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And then there was one
QUAZI ZULQUARNAIN ISLAM
It is time to confess. I have never idolised wllllh Sachin Tendulkar. In fact, a large part of my school-going years were dedicated to hours spent scribbling away on the back of my class notebook every conceivable reason, logical and otherwise, as to why the West Indian Brian Lara was a better batsman than Tendulkar.
I grew up in the late 80s and 90s, at a time when cable television first began beaming us grainy Prime Sports footage of two young cricketers whose talent and meteoric rise would surely see them one day ascend the pantheon of the cricketing gods.
There was Lara, the Calypso prince, all twinkle toes and flamboyant backlift, a gnome among the impossible tall West Indians, a man who delivered back foot punches through the covers with both feet in the air and played hook shots with his right leg raised in dismissive nonchalance.
And then there was Tendulkar, who leant into cover drives like the manuals told you to, his elbows high, his head steady, the ball striking his heavy willow precisely beneath the eyes and then racing to the boundary.
In the eyes of a seven-year-old Sachin was perfect, but whisper it, boring. Inevitably then, when my cricket coach asked me to watch the upcoming Indian batsman and
model my own game on him, I didn't listen. In my eyes, Lara's batting held so much more charm. Like most cricket-mad kids of that era I spent hours in front of the mirror shadow batting, but instead of following Tendulkar's regimented example, I practised Lara's skittle across the stumps, high backlift, his full follow-through, his delicate late cuts.
In my eyes, Lara could do no wrong. Every big Lara inning was, to me, a vindication of his greater talent, his higher ceiling, and his greater appeal. Tendulkar was constant, omnipresent, boringly brilliant, a man whose name could only be whispered begrudgingly against the whimsical Lara. It was a blinding bias and in hindsight, I look like a fool. Then again, what pre-teen isn't?
But as the years rolled by, and the careers of the cricketers I had grown up with slowly faded to black, the true and stark greatness of Sachin Tendulkar began to present itself.
The numbers are behemoth, as is expected of someone who has played top-level cricket for 24 years across four decades. Just let this sink in - for 17 of the 24 years that Sachin played cricket, he was amongst the top five batsmen in the world. Most cricketers are lucky to have one purple patch in their career; Sachin had at least three. But even beyond that, the stories Sachin has scripted stand beyond reproach; his records are an apotheosis.
As any man worth his salt will tell you, the true test of greatness is in sustenance and no man in cricket, nay, any
sport has sustained better than Tendulkar. Consider this, Tendulkar made his Test debut six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that time Usain Bolt was three years old, Lionel Messi was two, Barcelona had never won the Champions League, and the world had yet to hear of Zinedine Zidane.
But Tendulkar has persisted, a deity among mortals, a man whose name will reverberate through cricket history. As Bangladesh's own Shakib al Hasan put it, "We have this running competition between ourselves in the Bangladesh team to see who can get him out, so that we can all talk about it years later, when we have all quit the game."
And that in a nutshell is the legacy of Tendulkar. Someday we will all be gone, but the stories of Tendulkar will remain, no longer dusty through the lens of history, but caught in the vivid colors of modernity, told either through endless repeats on television or through stories told to children.
And so, if I could get a do-over, I would go back and erase those clever choice phrases on the back of my school notebooks and strongly chastise the young me for choosing a path that would lead only to madness.
Because over the course of the last two decades and some, as the chapters of the players I have grown up with closed finally one by one, 1 have realised one utter, irrevocable truth. Sachin Tendulkar is not just a great, he is the great.