The problem with Tendulkar

Is the ghost of Don Bradman interfering in his quest for the 100th?
©Getty Images




Amongst all the cricket-related questions that fire themselves into my brain during quiet moments, of which there are disturbingly many for a supposedly grown-up father of two and alleged political satirist, the one that has put its hand up and asked itself most frequently of late has been: How can you tell when a cricketer is in terminal career decline? (I will share some of the other questions in another blog later in the week.)

There is no formula for judging when a blip in form becomes the harbinger of inevitable retirement, or when those proposing the adage "form is temporary, class is permanent", start to add the words "but Father Time can be a cantankerous old bastard when he wants to be".

It will not have escaped the notice of the more eagle-eyed cricket followers that Sachin Tendulkar, the cricketing icon of his age and one of the greatest players in the history of the game, is still awaiting his 100th international hundred. All seven billion people currently at large in the world have not scored 100 international hundreds, and for the moment Tendulkar is still one of the them. All their forebears also failed to reach that milestone, and given the changing schedule and nature of modern cricket, it seems likely that all their descendants will fail to reach it as well.

So it is perhaps understandable that, in a game obsessed with milestones, this megamilestone is causing rather more fretting than, objectively, it should. Reaching it is not going to make Tendulkar a greater player, and failing to reach it would not make him a lesser one - though it would be quite annoying for him, and for cricket. If Neil Armstrong had landed his magic rocket on the moon, taken one look outside, decided it looked a bit chilly for a walk, and blasted himself and his buddies straight back to Earth, it would still have been a hugely impressive voyage. Having journeyed so far, obviously the symbolic moment of placing the flag on the moon was important – but the overall achievements of the space programme, and the broader technological miracle of being able to fire people 250,000 miles in a souped-up tin can and get them home again afterwards were, ultimately, of more significance.

It is now 29 innings since Tendulkar scored his 99th international hundred. It is his second longest sequence of innings without a century in his unfathomably massive international career (there was a 34-innings hiatus between hundred No. 78 and hundred No. 79, in 2007).

It is worth thinking back to that 99th hundred, his second century of a triumphant World Cup, both of them innings of peerless brilliance, in which his technique, judgement and boldness were close to flawless; a master in total control of his craft. At that point he had scored 11 hundreds for India in 14 months, at a rate of one every three innings, including eight in 15 Tests, and the first-ever ODI double-century. Statistically he had never been as good.

Since then, there have been 11 months and 29 innings of finely crafted near-misses, sawn-off cameos and failures, a cocktail of uncompleted brilliance and uncharacteristic uncertainty.

Why?

Has the pressure of reaching a milestone, to which no other player has ever, or is ever likely to, come close, affected the mind of the master? Have his 38 years and ten months on the planet, and more particularly his 22 years and three months of international cricket, finally caught up with him? Has his luck simply changed? Is he tired? Is he bored of watching a small, hard, red round thing fly towards him whilst hundreds of millions of people watch to see if he can hit it with a plank of wood? When you have done so 50,000 times, the novelty must wear off. Is he simply sated of milestones, after snaring his 200th international wicket in the Cape Town Test just over a year ago (for which, incidentally, there had been a 34-match, 15-month wait after wicket No. 199)? Or has the ghost of Donald Bradman been interfering, trying to ensure that his closest modern equivalent ends up like him, stranded on 99?