How young Tendulkar prepared for tests ahead
Sachin Tendulkar’s Test career is the stuff of legend—but it came after years of hard work. An excerpt from a new book on Test cricket
Late in his life, Sir Donald Bradman identified the batter who played most like him. ‘I was very, very struck by his technique,’ Bradman said in 1996. ‘I asked my wife to come and have a look at him. Because, I said, “I never saw myself play. But I feel this fellow is playing much the same as I used to." ‘It was just his compactness, his stroke pro duction, his technique. It all seemed to gel.’ The player’s name was Sachin Tendulkar. Bradman later invited Tendulkar to his 90th birthday. ‘We discussed batting,’ Tendulkar recalls. ‘How good batters could read the ball by looking at the bowler’s wrist position and also see which way the ball is spinning in the air and hence could read the delivery as soon as it was released.’
The man who would become the heaviest run scorer in Test history was first glimpsed on the maidans in Mumbai in the mid 1980s. Most days, the young Tendulkar – his father was a poet and university professor; his mother worked for the Life Insurance Corporation of India – boarded bus number 315 from the suburb of Bandra East to Shivaji Park. The maidans are a characteristic of Indian cricket; their prevalence helps to explain the abundance of Test players, especially batters, from Mumbai. Dozens of matches take place in parallel; the field in one game normally overlaps with the adjacent field, so that extra cover in one game might stand alongside midwicket in another. ‘Your peripheral awareness increased,’ Tendulkar reflects. ‘After having played on these, when I started playing in stadiums with only one match happening at a time, sud denly finding gaps became easier.’
Aged 11, Tendulkar first met the coach Ramakant Achrekar. Initially, Achrekar turned down Tendulkar for a place on his summer camp. Tendulkar’s older brother asked him to give Sachin another chance; Achrekar pretended that he wasn’t watching as he observed Sachin again. Achrekar took Tendulkar from one maidan to the next; he frequently played multiple games on the same day. The coach persuaded Tendulkar’s parents to move him to a different school, which was better for cricket; Tendulkar relocated from his parents to his aunt’s, to be closer to Shivaji Park.
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The young Tendulkar’s routine was relent less. During the summer, he batted for two hours in the nets from 7.30 a.m. Then, he went straight into a match at Shivaji Park, playing 55 games in 60 days one summer. Matches normally finished at 4.30 p.m.; by 5 p.m., Tendulkar was in the nets again for another two hours, each broken into five chunks. His practice would end with a final 15-minute session – this time on a wicket on the practice pitch. Achrekar placed a one rupee coin above his middle stump. Tendulkar could keep it if he survived the session without being dismissed; facing up to 70 fielders, he had to keep each ball along the ground. After running two laps of Shivaji Park with his pads and gloves on, Tendulkar finally went home; he often spoke of cricket in his sleep.
‘The maidans gave me exposure to playing on different surfaces at a very young age,’ Tendulkar says. ‘Achrekar Sir, my coach, made it a point that I got to play on different surfaces against different bowlers.’ ‘A lot of these maidans were big grounds and had big boundary lines. Hence, one had to run quite a bit between the wickets to score runs, which can become tiring. And when you are tired, the first thing that happens is that you lose con centration. Playing in those maidans in my school days was a good way to train and develop the habit of concentrating and maintaining focus for long hours.’
At Azad Maidan, ten kilometres south of Shivaji, the Tendulkar name would first reverberate. In the Harris Shield, an annual interschool tournament named after Lord Harris, Tendulkar played for Shardashram Vidya Mandir. In a semi-final against St Xavier’s in February 1988, when he was 14, Tendulkar walked out at 84–2, joining Vinod Kambli, a boy who was 15 months older and would play Test cricket alongside him. The two batted in unison until lunchtime on day two, when their team declared on 748–2; Kambli hit 349 not out, Tendulkar 326 not out. After the semi-final, Tendulkar was taken to the other end of the maidan and scored 178 not out in another game. Across the quarter-final, semi-final and final of the 1988 Harris Shield, Tendulkar’s scores read: 207 not out, 326 not out and 346 not out.
Aged 15, Tendulkar made his first-class debut for Bombay; batting at his favoured number four, he scored 100 not out. ‘I have never seen so much concentration and stamina in one so young,’ said Raj Singh, then chairman of the national selection committee, in April 1989. Aged 16, Tendulkar’s international entrance could scarcely have been more onerous: a Test series in Pakistan – India’s greatest rival, whose attack included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Imran Khan and Abdul Qadir. On debut in Karachi, Tendulkar scored one run less than his age; next Test, he hit 59.
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In his fourth Test, in Sialkot, a Younis delivery deflected from the peak of Tendulkar’s hel met onto his nose. He had blood all over his shirt. The team doctor asked Tendulkar if he wanted to retire hurt. ‘No, I will play,’ Tendulkar declared. He batted on, ignoring signs that read ‘Child go home, and drink milk’. He flicked Waqar’s next ball to the boundary, and batted for over three hours for 57 to secure India a 0–0 drawn series. A year later, Tendulkar made his maiden Test century ... to secure a draw at Old Trafford. Named player of the match, he was awarded a bottle of champagne; too young to drink alcohol, Tendulkar kept the bottle for years. Next day Tendulkar asked the team manager whether he had made any mistakes during his innings...
Excerpted from ‘Test Cricket: A History’ by Tim Wigmore, with permission from the publishers, Quercus Books/Hachette India.
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