The MMC Tennis School, Nungambakkam

You know you're in India when the wall around a tennis school has pictures of Sania Mirza, Roger Federer and a bunch of cricketers.

You know you're in Chennai when that bunch of cricketers includes Cheeka and Sadagopan Ramesh.

Tendulkar, Coventry and the contours of greatness

"At a time when immediacy masquerades as relevance in sport, a nuanced understanding of true greatness evades us. It takes something as monumental as what Sachin Tendulkar achieved in Gwalior against a South African side of no little quality to prompt us to filter out the shrill absurdities and begin to examine the contours of real greatness."

So begins today's editorial in the newspaper I work for. 

I disagree with the point it makes, the one about immediacy and relevance. I don't think too many people with an interest in cricket, or in any other sport, would confuse the two. 

Editorial writers should develop a nuanced understanding of people's reactions to things, and realise that someone getting excited about Yuvraj Singh's six sixes in an over doesn't necessarily mean he/she thinks it's a feat comparable to, say, Rahul Dravid's 148 at Headingley. I didn't read or hear any such 'shrill absurdities' from the serious sports media when it happened, or on any other similar occasion.

I don't think anyone fails to see real greatness when it's in front of them. Those that deny it - everyone, for instance, who approves of the right-wing hatred directed at MF Hussain - do so because they'd rather be blind to it, or are bigots.

I don't think the Gwalior knock prompted anyone to examine the 'contours of greatness'. The 200 mark in ODIs was waiting to be broken. Tendulkar, happily for the editorial writers, happened to be the guy who got there first. I wonder what they'd have said if Charles Coventry had scored six runs more that day against Bangladesh.

I'm not calling Coventry great - and I don't think anyone would - but I wish people had given his achievement a little more respect. Most people instead couldn't wait for someone to come and wipe his name off the record book, as if his temerity to score so many in an innings had somehow sullied cricket's integrity.

Contrary to what the editorial says, most journalists are hasty to deny the not-so-great their due when they accomplish something special. How often, for instance, do you see the sentence - "the word great is overused"?

Where were you?

Today, Sachin Tendulkar made 200 in a one day international. First time anyone's done that.

You know all that. What you may not know, and this is important, is what I was doing when he went about his business.

The first part of his knock I spent in office. Where everyone, except me, was watching him bat on TV. If you're a regular reader of my other blog, you'd know why I wasn't watching. And no, I didn't even watch him bat left-handed on the glass of my cubicle. That would have been an interesting answer to the "what were you doing when the 200 barrier in men's limited-overs internationals was breached for the first time in history" question.

Just after he reached his hundred, I left office, to go cover a football game.

It was a particularly one-sided game. Integral Coach Factory beat Central Excise 5-0, in case you want to know.

When the score was 3-0, about five minutes into the second half, someone told me Sachin was on 196 not out. A few minutes later, someone else told me he'd reached 200.

I watched some more football.

What I dream about when I dream about Tendulkar

A few months ago, I awoke from a disturbing dream. I dreamed of waking up. Of being woken up. By my mum. Who held a newspaper. Whose front-page headline announced that Sachin Tendulkar was dead.
I don't know what set the dream off. The details were fuzzy, but I saw clearly in the obituary that he had died aged 37. Which I guess was my mind playing around with a fact pulled from my memory - Victor Trumper's age  when he died of Bright's Disease.
Once I'd properly woken up and reassured myself that Tendulkar was still around, I recalled something Ravi Shastri once said, sometime in the mid-90s, after Tendulkar had broken some sort of record.

"He is someone sent from up there to play cricket (pause) and go back."

Ravi Shastri can be very eerie sometimes. And the eeriness bursts forth without warning - against the run of play, he'd say - emerging unannounced from his usual stream of faux-testosterone-laden cliches.
Anyway, I can't picture a post-retirement Tendulkar. Can you? What do you see him doing?

The old scoreboard at University Union

The Madras University Union ground only hosts lower division league cricket these days. It wasn't always so - luminaries like Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Subramaniam Badrinath and (no, really) Noel David have played here in the past.

When they played, they'd have seen their runs and wickets recorded on this scoreboard, this joyous contraption that requires the scorer to clamber up a ladder.

Now, the scoreboard's skeleton stands unused, hidden from view of the players by a newly constructed - and usually empty - spectator gallery. The scoreboard they now use is smaller, less cumbersome, and far less charming.

The cultural morass we inhabit

Insidiously, unnoticed, something has infiltrated our collective consciousness. I speak, of course, of the word 'awww', in its multifarious, multiple-doubleyoued avatars. It's everywhere, waiting to make you cringe and bemoan the cultural morass we inhabit.

Cricket commentary, I noted happily - apart from Shane Warne's entirely acceptable "Aw, look mate," which possesses none of the fluttery-eyelashed connotations of its more copiously-doubleyoued cousins - was about the only thing in the universe free of its pernicious influence.

Until today, that is, when it emerged without warning from the unexpected lips of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, when Gautam Gambhir drove Muttiah Muralitharan down the ground just after lunch.

Life as we know it will never be the same again.

Re-evaluating Gavaskar, the one-day batsman

No one talks about Sunil Gavaskar's one day international career, and the one innings that does get spoken about casts him in horribly unflattering light. That 36 not out has come to define his one-day career, which I think is unfortunate. By no means was his limited-overs career a progression of stodgy knocks that drove everyone insane.

His numbers, certainly, were no worse than most opening batsmen of his era. He even scored his runs at pretty much the same strike rate as Gordon Greenidge or Desmond Haynes, as these figures would suggest (strike rates of batsmen with a minimum of 25 innings as opener up to 31 December 1989, for innings played at the top of the order).

Which is not to say he was a great one-day batsman. He wasn't. He scored too few hundreds for a start. And he did terribly in the '83 World Cup. But it's unfair to call the 36 not out his defining knock.

So what is Gavaskar's defining one day innings? I've picked two, both of which came in matches that shook Indian cricket. Both times, he was dismissed in the 90s.

The first was at Berbice in 1983, three months before the World Cup win. Gavaskar made 90 against a pace attack containing Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Winston Davis and Malcolm Marshall, and from the platform he, Ravi Shastri and Mohinder Amarnath built, Kapil Dev exploded quite frighteningly to score 72 from 38 balls. India won by 27 runs, and West Indies had been beaten for the first time in a home one day international, portentously by the side that would knock them off their world champion perch.

Three years later, at Sharjah, Gavaskar made 92, out of an Indian total of 245 for seven. The fall of wickets column in the Cricinfo scorecard doesn't mention which over the wickets fell in, so I can't say how long was left when the second wicket fell at 216, but surely India should have finished with a bigger total. Gavaskar, seventh out at 245, clearly wasn't able to force the pace late in the innings.

But in the end, 245 nearly proved enough.

Now, while Javed Miandad's last-ball six has few parallels in limited-overs cricket for drama, I haven't quite understood how this match, the final of a relatively unimportant tournament, has resonated so much among Indian cricket fans, and how there's still so much dissection of Chetan Sharma's last ball. But in any case, this match is seen as the one that changed the equations of India-Pakistan cricket forever.

So coming back to Gavaskar, I see these two as 'defining' innings because they seem to represent his one-day career perfectly. Both times, his efforts were overshadowed, and rightly so, for Kapil's and Miandad's knocks belonged on a different level altogether. A level, perhaps, he wasn't capable of attaining in one-day cricket. But he was present, hovering in the background, a subtle but essential influence.