Final Test

Dilip D'souza

Description

The deafening noise in the Wankhede turns to silence so complete that you'd swear you can hear Tendulkar's footsteps as he begins the walk back to the pavilion. It's the end of an era, they said. No more switching off televisions when he got out; no more resounding chants of 'Sa-chi-i-i-n, Sa-chin!' In November 2013, Sachin Tendulkar played his final Test. Dilip D'Souza builds on close and detailed observation of those two and a half days, capturing all the hysteria it spawned, the love and adulation that showered from the rafters at the Wankhede, the choking emotion, and yes, there was a match on too, against the West Indies. Final Test discusses cricket from the old to the new, as Sachin takes to the pitch one final time.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184006643
• Langue: English

Extrait

DILIP D’SOUZA

FINAL TEST
EXIT
SACHIN
TENDULKAR
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Contents
A Note on the Author
Foreword by Harsha Bhogle
Prologue
Introduction
1. Before the Match
2. Day 1, Morning Session: Illusion
3. Day 1, Post-lunch: Crumble
4. Day 1, Post-tea: Anticipation
5. Day 2, Morning and Post-lunch: Consolidation
6. Day 2, Post-tea: Humiliation
7. Day 3, Morning: Last Rites
8. After the Match/Endgame
9. Legacy
Appendix: Scorecard
Appendix: Tendulkar’s Test Numbers
Thank you
Follow Random House
Copyright
A Note on the Author

Dilip trained as a computer scientist (BITS Pilani, Brown University) and spent many years in software. Somewhere along the way he tried his hand at writing and found that more interesting. He’s been a full-time writer for 15 years now. He’s won several fellowships and awards for his writing (Outlook/Picador prize, Newsweek/Daily Beast prize, Wolfson College Press Fellowship, and more). He has written for publications like Caravan, Hindustan Times, Mint, Outlook, the Hindu, Washington Post, NYT, Die Zeit, Salon, Newsweek, Daily Beast, among others. He writes a well-regarded mathematics column, A Matter of Numbers, for Mint.
Dilip’s interests are reading, music, playing tennis, and travel. He has travelled to some 25 countries, backpacking, driving, taking buses and trains. Born in Madras, he grew up in Bombay, lived in Delhi, Pilani and then in the US for ten years; he has been back in Bombay for 22+ years now. His wife Vibha Kamat teaches French; they have two children, Sahir (15) and Surabhi (10). They have two cats, Aziz and Cleo. They rule.
Final Test is Dilip’s fifth book.
Also by Dilip D’Souza
Branded by Law: Looking at India’s Denotified Tribes The Narmada Dammed: An Inquiry into the Politics of Development Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America The Curious Case of Binayak Sen
For you who liked me because I liked John McEnroe
I never retired from tennis, not officially. I kept on playing through 1992 before I quietly slipped away. … When your time is up, you should make room for the next group of guys coming through. I’d entertained enough crowds and played some great tennis over the years. If people remember me for that, I’m good.
Jimmy Connors, The Outsider
Foreword
L ike everyone else, I was torn from within in the last months of Sachin Tendulkar’s Test career. And it was because, like everyone else, I was a huge admirer of Sachin; not just the cricketer but the person too. There was a part of me saying, ‘Sachin, go, while you can still give to the game. All your life you have put the game first, you have given with your heart and with your bat. Go, while you are still giving, not when you have to take from our great game.’
And there was another part of me saying, ‘Don’t go Sachin because I want to see that straight drive more, that punch off the back foot more, that chase down from third man to save one even if the opposition is 250-1. Don’t.’ I was, of course, like everyone else, being selfish. It was clear that Sachin was coming to the end of one of the most extraordinary careers the game will see but we wanted him to go on for ourselves.
We didn’t want the game to die a little bit in front of our eyes. Once again, we wanted him to come out to bat for us.
I must admit I didn’t want him to finish in Johannesburg or Durban or Cape Town. When you go, and there is a little bit of death in retirement, you must in front of your own. I didn’t think Sachin deserved the right to be picked for India forever but I thought he had done enough to merit a goodbye in front of the fans to whom he had given, and from whom he had received, so much. It is just the silly romantic in me but if I controlled the world, I would let Rahul Dravid finish in Bengaluru, Sourav Ganguly at the Eden Gardens, and VVS Laxman in Hyderabad. Sachin had to finish at the Wankhede. It was where he scored his first first-class century, it was where he played the innings that put him into the Indian team. It was the city that defined him.
It was like a wedding. Everybody running around to make it a success, including the groom! The gods have always been kind to Sachin, and they were aligning the planets for him. Number 200, the Wankhede, the West Indies, as much guests as opponents… My mind went back to the shy 14-year-old I had first seen at Shivaji Park and I marvelled at his journey. Sachin was always meant to be, but no one imagines things of this magnitude.
Dilip D’Souza has created a wonderful montage of that last Test. It had to be a montage, it couldn’t be a painting. How could you fit everything on a canvas? And, as I read it, the memories came alive. I had only one wish for him that day. I wanted him to score some runs. I pondered over what I was asking. Hit me that note again, Lata Mangeshkar? But I wished that way because I didn’t want him to trudge back looking spent. I wanted a bat tucked back into the armpit, not a rusty implement. And I wanted to see that straight drive again.
It was quite a day. It was quite an event. And I will always consider myself blessed to be part of it. The BCCI had got jackets made for everyone. I told you it was like a wedding! SRT 200, they had embroidered on it. It was nice that it was embroidered, not emblazoned. It would have been inappropriate otherwise, it wouldn’t have been Sachin.
And he played the drive.
Like he had as a child prodigy. Like he had on cricket grounds all over the world. And, we told ourselves, like no one will again. That is of course untrue, but it was that kind of day!
And when it was over, not the Sammy catch but the match itself, I found myself being put into the commentary position. The memories became a deluge. I had seen each of his first seven Test hundreds, carried a bat for him to Australia, been to his wedding, seen all those great hundreds, Perth, Edgbaston, Melbourne, Sydney, Chennai, Chennai, Chennai…
Ian Bishop, one of the gentlemen of the game, was with me. At my bidding, he spoke a couple of sentences, then moved back. Sachin’s speech brought a lump to his throat as it did to mine and grown men and grandmothers and brash teenagers were in tears. The final lap of honour was a privilege few cricketers get and the crowd in Mumbai was awesome. I might have predicted that the 14-year-old I first saw would get a few Test centuries but I could never have predicted that he would deliver as stirring a farewell speech as he did.
I wasn’t surprised he went back to the middle to pay his respect to the 22 yards that had so defined him. This was Sachin. He never stopped being the kid who was grateful to play cricket. Then he walked up the steps and turned in. ‘You were a great habit, Sachin,’ I found myself saying. He was.
I hope Dilip’s book rekindles all those memories. It is a wonderful concept and a huge challenge because it wasn’t just a cricket match. It was the largest collective outpouring of emotion I have ever seen. Dilip has had to do justice to that.
Harsha Bhogle
September 2014
Prologue
If George Best concentrates hard in his dream, he may see quite a few of us on the sidelines, straining to catch a glimpse of a footballer whose like we may never look upon again.
Hugh McIlvanney, The Best Years of Our Lives
S omething like 35,000 pairs of eyes, and many many more via TV, are focused on a particular spot in the pavilion at the Wankhede stadium, at the head of a flight of stairs. It’s likely that nobody notices—certainly I don’t—what the West Indies team is doing as we wait. Murali Vijay, the batsman who is just out, walks up the stairs and turns right at the top, but we don’t notice him either. He’s not the reason we’re staring at the spot. In the section of the stands adjacent to the stairs, every spectator has rushed over to the wire fence that separates them from it, pressing against the fence like debris after a storm, their cellphones held aloft like a thousand offerings to the heavens.
Tendulkar emerges, and that moment later becomes the MCC’s Photo of the Year. In nearly pastel shades except for a few red and blue shirts among the fans, photographer Atul Kamble captures arms straining to hold their phones up, a young girl with her hands cupped around her mouth sitting on her father’s shoulders, a plastic water tank behind the grimy Wankhede wall, a dozen empty stairs with two gleaming railings…and at the top of the stairs in the customary white, just starting the turn to head down, his head encased in a blue hemisphere of a helmet and looking up at the sun, slightly grubby pads and arm-guards in place, right hand about to wriggle into its glove as the left already has, bat tucked under the left elbow at precisely 45 degrees, its handle encased in the saffron-white-green of—what else—the Indian flag: Tendulkar is here and ready to play.
It’s tough to find words to describe what the crowd is doing, as he walks down the stairs and onto the field. Looking around, I see plenty of fans hurrying to get pictures of each other at this, THE moment of the match. They have spent most of the day in a cheery frenzy, and have erupted every time Tendulkar so much as touches the ball, or waves to them. They have got steadily more pumped with every wicket that brought this moment closer, especially Shikhar Dhawan’s two balls ago and Vijay’s now. Yet we all knew this moment would be the loudest, most raucous of all—besides being worthy of capturing on virtual film—and yet even so I don’t think I could have anticipated the wall of sheer noise that rises out of the stadium. It’s an almost physical presence, this song of adoration for this icon to a country. It’s almost as if Tendulkar has to push through it, part its crashing waves, to find his way to the middle.
But push through and find his way he does, as he has a thousand times before. Only this time, it’s his final time. It’s 3.35 pm on Thursday, November 14, 2013.
What were you doing when Sachin Tendulkar began his last