Sachin

Gulu Ezekiel

Description

At seventeen, Sachin Tendulkar became the second youngest man to make a hundred in international cricket; ever since, there has been no looking back. Today, Sachin is widely regarded as the world s finest batsman, with over 33,000 international runs the highest aggregate by far for any cricketer and an incredible 100 international centuries to his credit. In this biography of India s greatest sportsperson ever, Gulu Ezekiel pens a compelling account of Sachin the man and his passion for cricket. He tracks Sachin from his childhood when he first caught the bug of cricket, and follows him on his meteoric rise to international stardom. With unfailing attention to detail, he reconstructs the crucial matches and events that have marked Sachin s career and reveals the magic of the cricketer whom Wisden Cricket Monthly once dubbed bigger than Jesus

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184756425
• Langue: English

Extrait

GULU EZEKIEL
Sachin
The Story Of The World s Greatest Batsman
REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Preface to the Revised Edition
Prologue: The God of Indian Cricket
Bombay Boy
Schoolboy Prodigy
World Record
A Boy Among Men
Into the Cauldron of Test Cricket
12 Runs Short of Glory
Hail the Boy King
Home, Sweet Home
On Top Down Under
World Cup Debut
Two Little Bits of Cricket History
Success at Home and Abroad
The Great Friendship
The One-day Phenom
The Brian and Sachin Show
World Cup 1996-and England Again
Captaincy-I
Defeat and Despair
Confrontation
Musical Chairs
Desert Storm
The Don and I
On Top of the World
Trauma
Tragedy and Tears
Reluctant Messiah
Double-Then Trouble
Debacle Down Under
Stepping Down
Match-fixing and the CBI
The Greatest Series Ever
Foot Fault
Year of Controversies
Global Brand
Man and Myth
Foreign Travails
The World Cup
The Burden Eases
Year of Contrasts
Sunny Eclipsed
World Cup Woes
Drama Down Under and the IPL
Back on Top
Such a Long Journey
Annus Mirabilis
Finally, the World Cup
Down in the Dumps
Waiting to Exhale
At Last
Illustrations
Sachin Tendulkar in Figures by Mohandas Menon
Select Bibliography
Copyright Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
SACHIN
Gulu Ezekiel started his career in sports journalism with the Indian Express in Madras in 1982 before moving to New Delhi in 1991. He has been sports editor at the Asian Age , New Delhi TV and indya.com and has contributed to over 100 publications in India and around the world. He launched his own features and syndication company, GE Features in August 2001.
Ezekiel is the author of several books including Sourav: A Biography ; The Penguin Book of Cricket Lists ; The A-Z of Sachin Tendulkar and Captain Cool: The MS Dhoni Story.
To my mother Mrs Khorshed W. Ezekiel and my father late Professor Joe Ezekiel
Preface to the Revised Edition
An enormous amount of international cricket has been played around the world since the first release of this book seven and a half years back. This has meant the addition of nine chapters to this updated edition while the Epilogue from the original release has been removed since it is no longer relevant. In addition I have added a paragraph or two to a couple of the original chapters to bring them up to date.
The volume of cricket Tendulkar has played in the interim and the spread and easy accessibility of the Internet means the statistical section has been drastically reduced.
When the book first came out in mid-2002, Tendulkar had played 91 Test matches and 286 One-day Internationals. By the end of 2009 those figures read 162 Test matches and 440 ODI s (plus a solitary Twenty20 International).
Tendulkar completed 20 years of international cricket in November 2009 and after all these years he still remains the world s greatest batsman.
The name of the book thus remains the same-a tribute to the subject s genius-but much of the story has evolved.
This new, revised edition seeks to bring it up to date.
Gulu Ezekiel
New Delhi
December 2009
Prologue
The God of Indian Cricket
The greatest Indian alive -Bishan Singh Bedi
Sachin Tendulkar is a god in India and people believe luck shines in his hand, Australia s opening batsman Matthew Hayden told the Sydney Sun-Herald in April 2001, shortly after returning from a tour of India. It is beyond chaos-it is a frantic appeal by a nation to one man.
The question was then put to Tendulkar by an Indian journalist: Are you God?
I don t think anyone can become God or even come close to it, was the response.
Quite right.
But in a country of a billion plus (with many millions more in the Indian diaspora) where the unity in diversity mantra of the state machinery has begun to ring hollow, Tendulkar has emerged as perhaps the nation s sole unifying force. Columnist C.P. Surendran had this to say about what the batting maestro means to Indians everywhere: Every time he walks to the wicket, a whole nation, tatters and all, marches with him to the battle arena. A pauper people pleading for relief, remission from the lifelong anxiety of being Indian seeking a moment s liberation from their India-bondage through the exhilarating grace of one accidental bat. ( An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and Other Essays by Ramachandra Guha)
Time magazine chose Tendulkar as one of their Asian heroes and put him on the cover of their Asian edition (29 April 2002) for the second time in three years. Inside, The Bat out of Heaven shared space with human rights activists, freedom fighters and other luminaries.
At 26 Tendulkar was the youngest to be featured by India Today in their 100 People Who Shaped India special issue in 1999 (Millennium Series Vol. I).
In a poll conducted by the Week magazine at the height of the match-fixing scandal in 2000, both Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly were in the list of ten most admired Indians.
The honours have come thick and fast in an international career that began in 1989. Remarkably for a batsman, in those 20 years, there has only been the rare bad patch from which he has also promptly bounced back. It is this consistency that made Steve Waugh say in awe: You take Sir Donald [Bradman] away and he is next up I reckon.
Just as Sunil Gavaskar reserved his best for the mighty West Indies in the 70s and 80s when they were the best team in the world, so Tendulkar has had some of his greatest moments against world champions Australia. So, Waugh certainly knows what he is talking about.
The greatest Indian alive is the tag Bishan Singh Bedi attached to Tendulkar. He clarified his remark when I spoke to him for this book in October 2001. I said that in 1998 after his two centuries in Sharjah against Australia that won us the title. I had said then that he should share the title with Lata Mangeshkar. I was struck by the amount of entertainment he provided for the average Indian, thrashing the Australian bowlers to all parts. It was the only thing the common Indian had to cheer about-plus Lata-ji s incredible voice. Sachin for me is God s gift to Indian cricket.
One of Tendulkar s many admirers was the greatest of them all, Sir Don Bradman. In April 2002 in the West Indies, the Holy Grail of batting, Bradman s mark of 29 centuries was equaled by his heir apparent. Then in December 2008 he went past the world record of his mentor Sunil Gavaskar with his 35th century.
In 1996, during a television interview Gavaskar threatened to personally throttle Sachin if his prediction of 40 Test centuries and 15,000 runs for his fellow-Mumbaikar did not come true. By the time this book went to press, his figures stood at 42 Test centuries and 12,773 runs. That of course is apart from 45 hundreds in ODIs and 17,178 runs!
Since its international debut in 1932, Indian cricket has been blessed with at least one towering figure for each decade. The 30s belonged to C.K.Nayudu, India s first Test captain; the 40s were the Vijay Merchant decade; the 50s saw the domination of all-rounder Vinoo Mankad; in the 60s it was Tiger Pataudi who gave a new dimension to Indian cricket with his astute captaincy; the 70s belonged to Sunil Gavaskar and the 80s to Kapil Dev.
Sachin Tendulkar made his Test debut in 1989 at the age of 16. He crossed 1000 runs and scored five Test centuries before the end of his teens. Since then he has dominated not only Indian cricket, but the world game as well. And that domination has now reached two decades.
If this book were a work of fiction, the rise of Sachin Tendulkar from middle-class anonymity to global fame in the span of less than a decade would find few takers. But it is true. And that is what makes it awe-inspiring.
What are the advantages of being Sachin Tendulkar? he was asked in an interview ( Sportsworld , May 1995).
I would like to be humble, be polite to everybody and would like to give respect to my elders. I m not really expecting anything from the people for the little (fame) I have earned I believe rules are there to be observed irrespective of whoever you are.
That in essence is the man. This is his story.
1
Bombay Boy
I thought there was talent in Sachin. -Ajit Tendulkar
He scored his maiden first-class century on debut at 15; his first Test ton came when he was just 17. But the first person to bowl to Sachin was his nanny. Laxmibai Ghije used to throw a plastic ball at the toddler, all of two and a half years, who would hit it back with a dhoka (washing stick). We used to go to the terrace and play. I was the first bowler he faced in his life, the 68-year-old recalled in an interview to the Week (29 November 1998).
For 11 years Sachin was under the care of Laxmibai at the writers cooperative housing society of Sahitya Sahawas (roughly translated, the community of litterateurs ) in the middle-class suburb of Bandra (East). His father, Professor Ramesh Tendulkar, taught Marathi at Mumbai s Kirti College, and mother Rajini worked with the Life Insurance Corporation of India ( LIC ). Sachin was born on 24 April 1973, 11 years after brother Ajit; sister Savita and brother Nitin were the older siblings. His grandfather named him after the famous Hindi music composer, Sachin Dev Burman. Coincidentally, music would be one of the adult Sachin s three passions, the other two being cricket and his family.
Nitin, Savita and Ajit were children from their father s first marriage. When their mother passed away, Ramesh was left with three young children to bring up, and as is the custom in several parts of India, he married the sister of his late wife.
The family was not particularly sports oriented, with poetry and literature being the abiding passions of father Ramesh, a gold medallist of Bombay University in both the BA and MA examinations. Nitin took after his father and his initial interest in cricket was soon diverte