I had decided to write this piece when Tendulkar retired, however, what with him being out of form in the last one year, this has seemed less and less likely, I think I will get down to it. (I say less and less likely as Tendulkar, much like Gavaskar before him is too conscious of his legacy to not retire on a high) To loosely borrow from Nick Hornby, I fell in love with the game of cricket as a boy much as I was to fall in love with women later. It was a miserable and desperate sort of love, obsessive in its need to love and driven not so much by even a desire to be loved back but by its revelry in a narrative built around torment and heartache, which elevates an otherwise mundane existence to a thrilling albeit self absorbed suspense and high drama.
Growing up as a 90s cricket fan in India was an education in character building and perseverance. The story begins with (and will end with) Sachin. Indian batsmen have traditionally scored heavily in their own backyards. But, it is the overseas knock, often scored in the face of adversity, shoring up one end while the others around you wilt, that separate the men from the boys. Sachin, though was always special, the boy wonder, the slayer of the wily veteran Abdul Qadir at 16, scoring an overseas hundred at 17 and most famously, standing tall in all of his five foot five frame at the chin music haven at 18. The legend of Tendulkar had been established that day in Perth and his subsequent conquests - neutralising Shane Warne at Chennai, the twin centuries at Sharjah, the six over third man off Shoaib Akhtar in the 2003 World Cup, counter-attacking Dale Steyn in Capetown, the endorsement from the Don himself, and the sheer monstrosity of numbers were just further chapters that crystallized and built on the myth that had been born during his teens. He was consistently at the core of the narrative, Arjuna amongst the Pandavas, the proverbial hero.
The support cast included the much lampooned Anil Kumble. An engineer Bangalore, Kumble was the rare legspinner, never easy on the eye. Not for him was the soaring flight that would draw the batsman out only to be beaten, he couldn't spin the ball square, he bowled mostly straight yet the batsmen continued to miss it such was the precision, subtlety and perseverance of his art. Kumble also understood the value of constant evolution, adding to his repertoire every few years. Dravid and Ganguly joined them a little later. Co-debutantes who could not have been more dissimilar in their approach of the game or the way they played, yet they formed a fine marriage for years. You add Laxman and Sehwag to the mix, men with mercurial talents and oodles of self belief, one a wristy artist, prettier to watch any other cricketer when on song and the other, primitive and uncomplicated in his approach of "see ball, hit ball", and you had the core actors in stories. There were others filling in for supporting roles, Srinath and Prasad, overworked fast bowlers of limited talent, Harbhajan and Yuvraj, young men who never grew up, the highly skilful yet underachieving Zaheer Khan, to name but a few.
This was not a team with a lot of options. There were no menacing fast bowlers, no bench strength to allow for any degree of rotation to share the workload, no imposing openers till Sehwag turned up. But they won often in India, and managed to compete abroad. They weren't champions, never dominating sides out of the contest, but scrappy men who didn't stand down from the fight like their predecessors. This was also a largely middle class and cultured team. The leadership comprised men from cities, mostly from middle class backgrounds, cerebral men who took pride in their talents but largely underplaying their larger than life status. Importantly, they had lost the gentility which accompanied most Indian teams before, often in awe of the opposition, and expecting to lose. But they did not believe in posturing for the opposition.
It is both fortunate and unfortunate when the nucleus and the narrative of the team is built entirely around men who are the same age, for they pick up and leave pretty much at the same time. The follower of the game is left slightly unprepared especially when it is accompanied by sudden cultural shifts. The definition of what is cool in sport should change gradually or it makes relatively young people like us feel very old. I can applaud all the talents of Viral Kohli and he is indeed, the future, but the slew of invectives he leaves behind in his trail every time he exits, belongs, for people in my generation, in the playground when you are ten, not on the poster boy of Indian cricket. Similarly, MSD is as cool as they come, in anybody's books, but he is not a real test cricketer. It gets to a point when you don't really know what to root for.
When Sachin retires, my interest in cricket will, I think, become largely academic. I will continue to follow the game but I will lose the sense of obsessive drama that the game has always carried for me. I did not expect to feel quite so old at twenty five.
