Ton-dulkar: Celebrating a 13-yr rollercoaster ride

1989. That was the year of V P Singh’s National Front government. Bhagyashree set male hearts on fire. The Ambassador was the hottest-selling car; and you could still choose to buy a Premier Padmini. What was it like out there on the cricket pitch?

SPOTLESS WHITES: Flannels bore the national crest; the billboards were beyond the boundary
DD DOES IT: Before cable television, we had to make do with all three of Doordarshan’s cameras, Dr Puri and Fredun de Vitre. However did we cope with Channel 9?
FITNESS: The then physio, Ali Irani, could — and frequently did — book players’ tickets, have ‘vegetarian’ food delivered to their rooms, escort them to parties. Training? As popular as sticky wicket
NO AGENTS, PLEASE: Tendulkar’s first TV commercial fetched him a couple of lakh rupees. An agent was someone who sold you insurance and dealt in property. They still do; only, the property is the cricketer, the insurance his five-year contract
SHARJAH: We still played there, even though you could bet your bottom dirham Miandad would clobber us all over the park. Sharjah isn’t Sharjah anymore, of course; it has relocated lock, stock and oil barrel to Morocco (Vikrant Gupta)

Retired from cricket at 23

After making his Test debut in virtual anonymity in the second Test at Faislabad, Vivek Razdan, then 20, used some disconcerting movement off the wicket to claim 5-79 in the final Test at Sialkot and help his team gain a 74-run first innings lead. That was the last Test he played. Though he joined the subsequent tour of New Zealand, he sat out the series and took just one wicket in a first-class game on the entire tour.

He survived in the one-day team, his last ODI against Sri Lanka at Nagpur in 1990-91. ‘‘My only regret is that I should have been given at least another opportunity. I was dropped after a fairly good performance in Pakistan; if I’d performed badly, I would have had no grudges.’’ After initially representing Tamil Nadu (he was at the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai), Razdan shifted to Delhi and helped it win the Ranji Trophy in 1991-92. he retired the next season, still in his early 20s. He now coaches in South Delhi schools.
— S Santhanam

Solace in the silver screen

Salil Ankola barely remembers the settings of the only Test he played. ‘‘It’s all a haze. There was this guy jumping over the fence and tearing up Srikkanth’s shirt…There was also this furore when somebody came up and pinched Abdul Qadir’s bottom. There was a big commotion. Other than these I somewhow fail to recollect anything whatsover.’’

Ankola’s a much travelled man, having been on the tours to Sri Lanka and New Zealand (1993-94) and then England (1996). He looks back wryly: ‘‘I’ve probably set a record for watching more Tests from the sidelines than I’ve played in.’’ Now 35, Ankola is playing a different role: as an actor in TV serials and Hindi films. But his heart is still in cricket. ‘‘There’s always a TV set whenever I go for a shoot so that I can watch the matches. Cricket..is a kind of nemesis!’’ He regrets the brevity of his career: ‘‘I wish I could have played more Tests. I was always a trier. I was termed as a one-day player, which was not right. I really wouldn’t know where I went wrong.’’
— Jaideep Marar

Any career that spans 13 years and 99 Tests has more memorable moments than is possible to remember. Instead of picking our own, we asked three people closely identified with Sachin to pick their favourite

Silencing Sydney sledging
RAVI SHASTRI
(EX-INDIA CAPTAIN)
Sydney, January ’93. This was in the third Test of the series against Australia. Some time in the afternoon, I was enjoying myself with the Aussies. I had gone past my hundred, which I eventually doubled, and the close-in fielders — Ian Healy and the Waughs — were trying to sledge me off. They said a few things, I said a few and it was getting to a stage where kids of Tendulkar’s age would have run scared.

Then Tendulkar, who must have been batting on four or five runs at that stage, came to me after one over and said: ‘‘I won’t sledge back till I get 100’’. He must be crazy, I thought. He hadn’t scored runs in the first two Tests at Brisbane and Melbourne — which India lost without a whimper — and here he was, so confident and so sure of a century! The rest of the day I watched from the other end how Tendulkar set about dismantling the feared Aussie attack. He played ferocious cut and pull shots, picking up the length of the ball very early. Whenever it was pitched up, Tendulkar drove gloriously. A couple of straight drives off Craig McDermott and Mervyn Hughes are still vivid in my memory. The most vocal of the Aussies stood up to applaud the little genius at work.

‘I did it for you, coach’
ANSHUMAN GAEKWAD
(COACH, 1997-99)
There are many that I cherish because he won so many matches for me, but the one that sticks out is the match against Australia at Chennai, 1997-98. Before the match, we had a team meeting where we discussed that what we needed was a good first innings lead to beat Steve Waugh’s side. ‘‘Someone has to score a century’’, said Sachin.

Who would it be, I asked. he stood up and said ‘‘I will do it.’’. The next day he was 155 not out, having hit Shane Warne around the park. After coming back to the stadium he told me, ‘‘I did it for you, coach.’’

I was his partner for the 1st ton
MANOJ PRABHAKAR
(FORMER ALL-ROUNDER)
I was at the other end when Sachin scored his first Test century (119 n.o.). We put on a match-saving 160-run unbroken partnership for the seventh wicket on the final day of the second Test at Old Trafford in August 1990. Sachin had missed his first three-figure mark in New Zealand a couple of months earlier. Incidentally, John Wright, the present India coach, had caught him for 88 off Danny Morrison at Napier then. At Old Trafford, we were left to score 408 to win after having lost the first Test at Lord’s. But we lost Ravi, Sidhu, Manjrekar, Vengsarkar, Azhar and Kapil with hardly 125 runs on the board. While I defended at one end, Sachin went after the England bowlers (Devon Malcolm, Angus Fraser, Chris Lewis and Eddie Hemmings) at the other. Amazingly, he didn’t waver even while approaching his maiden century; he exhibited textbook elegance all the way. We forced England to call off their victory hunt. And, of course, that innings heralded the arrival of someone special.
(As told to S Santhanam, Sandeep Dwivedi , Vikrant Gupta)