My first encounter with Sachin Tendulkar was at the age of 11, in the year-1987. As a child growing up with cricket, it was inevitable that I?d be thrust into mourning with Sunil Gavaskar leaving our cricketscape. Indian cricket, overnight, was in need of a saviour. Sure Dilip Vengsarkar was in real good form, Sanjay Manjrekar was making all the right noises with his sound technique and Mohammed Azharuddin often left us all in awe with his magical wristwork. But truth be told, none of them were in the league of the just retired Sunil Gavaskar. It was then in one of the Mumbai newspapers that I first read about Sachin Tendulkar. A child prodigy, he was being touted as the next big thing to happen to Indian cricket.
I was finally exposed to him in 1989, during his debut series in Pakistan. Three years older than I was, it was a terrifying thought to even think how a man of 16 would stand up to the likes of Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and the express debutant Waqar Younis.
My worst fears came true when in his very first Test match he was hit on the nose by a Waqar Younis scorcher. Navjot Singh Sidhu, then batting at the other end, recounted later, ?I saw the ball hit him on the nose and my immediate reaction was he has to be rushed to hospital. It was the end of it. I was about to rush to the other end when I saw Sachin raise his hand telling me to wait. In his squeaky voice, he said, Mein Khelega. He had blood all over his face but never once did he think of leaving the field.? These two simple words, Mein Khelega, best sums up Sachin Tendulkar, one who has always worn his nationalism on his sleeve and has played for the tri colour. Seeing Sachin continue to bat despite being hit and then cream a four of the very second ball he faced through cover, I was coming to terms with the fact that we were finally seeing our saviour in action, the man who would dominate Indian and world cricket for two subsequent decades.
This realisation was firmed up when Tendulkar scored a match saving hundred in England in 1990, his first in a match I intently followed on the radio. With the clock finally striking 10 pm in India, it was apparent that India had saved the game with Tendulkar and Manoj Prabhakar putting up a fantastic second innings recovery amidst adversity. Tendulkar, in his ninth Test match, stood unbeaten on 119, an innings that successfully sent the cricket world a message?it was seeing the birth of its next big superstar. I have since seen the replay of this innings many a time and still love to devour each shot played by Sachin on that swinging Manchester pitch.
However, all of the above were trailers to the real movie, which unfolded in Australia in 1992. The series had finally moved to Perth and India was already down and out. It was only a matter of time before the Australians crushed us with clinical precision in front of a partisan Western Australian crowd. It was the hallowed turf of the WACA, the Australian fortress, which offered the bowlers pace and bounce and where the Australian gladiators tested the world?s best. Only the real men survived the ordeal. Tendulkar, then 19 years and some days, defied all odds to script a fantastic hundred at his first test at the WACA. His 114 at Perth was an innings of incredible individual brilliance and compensated for a tame Indian surrender. We finally had an answer to the Australian fast men; we had Tendulkar. We continue to echo this sentiment even today, evident most recently when he almost single-handedly chased down that mammoth 351 at Hyderabad in the fifth one-dayer of the recently concluded series.
The writer is a cricket historian