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.