Sachin Tendulkar – Is he finished, or is he still on song?

This article on Rediff mounts a spirited defense of the legend of Tendulkar. The plea here is to stop questioning the great man’s form, lest he quit “before his time”. It contains the usual delicious (though occasionally over done) stew of statistics and weighty notions of “the burden of the nation of expectations”. CP Surendran, a columnist in the Times of India once made the following observation about the Tendulkar phenomenon –

‘‘Batsmen walk out into the middle alone. Not Tendulkar. Every time Tendulkar walks out to the crease, a whole nation, tatters and all, marches with him to the battle arena. A pauper people pleading for relief, remission from the life-long anxiety of being Indian, by joining in spirit with their visored savior.’’

Yet, this very same article, which makes its plea based on statistical rationality as well as psychoanalytical gobbledygook (“weighed down by expectations”), seems to make the fatally flawed assumption that Tendulkar will indeed remain the flawless master batsman for ever. I have myself written about “Endulkar” and a google query results in 762 articles with that name in it. There are a 106 blogs on the blog search. This will doubtless remain the first great blog debate about a cricketer’s retirement and legacy.

The numbers will always be in Tendulkar’s favor. The fact of the matter is that he is in decline (which is natural given that fact that he has now been playing cricket for 17 years) and is not the batsman he once was. He has slowed down considerably, and his game, though possibly wiser, is no longer the crisp clean Tendulkar game of yore. The unconquerable hero has given way to the wizened elder – more aware of the ways of the world, more aware of his own limitations, and painfully reminded of his persistent decline. He is not the player he once was, and he knows it. He plays a more cerebral game these days – like an aging tennis player – one who is a yard slower than he once was, but one who can every now and then, produce greatness purely from memory.

Yet, even in decline, he is still clearly good enough to hold his place in the India side, simply because there isn’t enough talent batting talent available for selection to threaten him. The supply side of selection is always ignored in the press – a glimpse perhaps into the less than sincere, and less than calm (even a bit vindictive) aspect of most calls for “dropping”. Players being dropped for “lack of form” or “lack of performance”, is seen as a slight – as a punishment to the player. In fact, it is simply a case of there being some one better available. In Tendulkar’s case, this is unlikely to happen, unless another Tendulkar comes along. So far, most of the new talent has merely inspired statements like this one by Kris Srikanth–

“Whatever talent the team management has seen in Raina, the youngster has done well to conceal it on the international stage.”

Selection is largely a practical matter of maximising runs, maximising wickets and consequently, ensuring victory. So even if Tendulkar isn’t quite the boy wonder of the 1990’s (and even the early 2000’s), he’s still well and truly amongst India’s most important batsmen. He won’t be finished unless he decides he is…… and i suspect that he will know before anyone else does.

Just for the record, Damien Martyn, Shivnaraine Chanderpaul, Kevin Pietersen, Sanath Jayasuriya, Kumar Sangakkara, and Chris Gayle, just to name a few, have done as well, if not better than Tendulkar in the 2006-07 season and were not in that list.

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