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?

Medium-fast

This morning, Star Cricket telecast the highlights of the 1996 World Cup group match between India and Sri Lanka at Ferozeshah Kotla – the match where Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana destroyed Manoj Prabhakar’s international career.
I’ve never seen Manoj Prabhakar bowl well; although I must say that all I’ve seen of his bowling are highlights packages from India’s 1990 tour to England, and now this match. He bowled at about 67 miles per hour, and needed a run-up as long as Waqar Younis or Wes Hall to achieve this speed.
Usually, bowlers who clock 67 miles per hour are placid-looking chaps who, as the cliché goes, know their limitations and bowl stump-to-stump. Manoj Prabhakar instead looked like he wanted to splatter the innards of batsmen all over the sightscreen at the other end and imagined himself easily capable of doing so.
As everyone knows, Manoj Prabhakar ended this match, and his international career, bowling off spin.
Immediately after this match, Star Cricket played the highlights of Sachin Tendulkar's 177 at Trent Bridge a few months after the World Cup. It made me chuckle, because here was another 67mph trundler who seemed to believe himself the spiritual heir to Frank Tyson - Dominic Cork.
Sachin punched Cork off the backfoot repeatedly and clinically, down the ground, through the off side and on. When he got bored, he waited a little while longer and cut him off his stumps, or moved across and whipped him off his legs. Despite all this, Cork continued to run in every ball with the aggression and flared nostrils of a slightly deranged bull.

Lara, Chanderpaul and alternate universes

Does anyone have a smaller percentage of not out innings (apart, of course, from batsmen who've never been not out) than Brian Lara? Six not outs in 232 innings. Interestingly, within the six not outs are contained two of Test cricket's immortal innings - the 153 and the 400.
Even without statistics, no one would deny the claim that Lara has played in some pretty underwhelming sides. Statistics sharpen this picture, and starken (does this word even exist?) the contrast with batsmen from other teams.
Number of not outs is a reasonable measure of the effect playing for a good or bad team can have on a batsman. But it isn't foolproof; for instance, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, who has played alongside Lara for much of his career, has 32 not outs in 121 Tests.
On the other hand, number of declarations is a direct measure of a team's batting strength. During Lara's 131-Test career, West Indies declared fifteen times.
Let's apply the same measures to two other batting greats, who averaged over 50 like him, and whose careers ran parallel to his:
Sachin Tendulkar has played 147 Tests so far, and has 27 not outs in 261 innings. In those 147 Tests, India has declared 47 innings closed.
Steve Waugh played 168 Tests, batted 260 times, was not out 46 times, and Australia declared 65 times during his career.
What might have happened if fate had stuck Lara in the Indian or Australian line-up?
Nobody can say with any degree of certainty that batsman A would bat the same way if he were part of team X instead of team Y. It's still an intriguing thought.
Something tells me Lara would have averaged over 60 in a better batting line-up. Everything about his game - his method, his personality, his range of shots - would have ensured him top dog status in any line-up.
That leads me to another intriguing thought: Would Chanderpaul average as much, and be as hard to dismiss, if he was Indian or Australian?
The answer, I think, is yes - provided the selectors pick someone of his aesthetic otherness. He'd love being away from the limelight, he'd be the perfect guy for domineering types to bat in partnership with, and he has so much hunger for runs that it wouldn't diminish one bit even if he was batting in a team where every other batsman was Bradman.
What do you think?