The day cricket gave birth to a fascinating modern fairytale
Being a regular cricket fan, how do you access a batter who has played over four years in international cricket, appeared in more than 70 one-day internationals and yet to score a century?
Not only that, the man started his ODI career with two ducks, scored only 12 half centuries in his first 69 matches and amassed a total of 1758 with a meagre average of 30.82.
The diminutive man crossed that 30-mark thanks to remaining not out in a few innings as he used to bat later in the order.
Reading three paragraphs without knowing the name of the batter and what he did later the first obvious question must be, how could he even keep his place in the team?
Apart from an occasional slow bowler that batter was actually shining like gold in Tests. At a very early age he made his debut and treated the world’s best bowlers with supreme authority that translated into some of the finest centuries in toughest conditions.
Probably that was the main reason for carrying the man in the shorter version as well hoping he will thrive one day.
But for us, the spectators of that era it was a paradox and many even jumped into the conclusion that the man is unfit to play ODIs. I must confess that claim back in the early nineties, when I was a school boy and a passionate cricket fan, seemed very much plausible.
And now, when I am writing this little piece, I am thinking how ridiculous that thinking was!
Ladies and gentleman, please don’t mock me, don’t ridicule the people of yesteryears as they claimed a certain Indian batter named Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar was unfit to play ODI cricket!
The statistics, which used to show the little master as an average cricketer, now proudly presents him as the king of ODI cricket who has broken all sorts of batting records.
And one may say that the turning around of his remarkable career began exactly 29 years ago, on this very day, 27 March 1994.
Like many innumerable examples, Tendulkar got some divine interference as he was sent into the opening for the first time in his career with regular opener Navjot Singh Sidhu missing out the match for injury.
The master blaster scored a swashbuckling 82 off just 49 to chase a moderate 142 in just 23 odd overs but in the grand narrative of ODI history a huge chapter was opened.
Sachin still needed another nine more innings to break the duck of a ton but he started gathering runs in prolific fashion and as they say the rest is history.
It is almost redundant to mention the stats of the great Indian batter but for record, he scored 15310 run opening in 340 innings and scored 45 centuries out of his total 49. Only Virat Kohli has so far scored more centuries (46) in a career than Tendulkar scored as opener.