Sachin Tendulkar, the movie: An ode to his battles versus the Akrams, Laras and Warnes

Nothing from the IPL either, not a haute frau in attendance nor a cheerleader in sight. Everything in this period goes, including that laboured ODI hundred at Mirpur, to make room for the good stuff. My movie prefers to believe that Tendulkar voluntarily marooned himself on 99 just so he had something else in common with the Don.

The early scenes consist of radio memories played over still pictures of that under-age face. I have no recollection of the 88 at Napier. Maybe it wasn’t telecast and perhaps I didn’t know the short wave frequency for Radio New Zealand. But I could find Test Match Special like a homing pigeon and I remember that Old Trafford hundred like it happened yesterday.

Don Mosey, Brian Johnston, Henry Blofeld, and Christopher Martin-Jenkins were the chorus as this serene seventeen year old did his burning-deck routine and managed, unlike the well-meaning but stupid boy in the poem, a happy ending. Azharuddin hit one of his headlong centuries in India’s first innings but Tendulkar was clearly the man of the match. I listened to his back-foot cover drives before I saw them playedand they were so vividly described that I watched them later with a sense of recognition.

My movie is an album of the strokes in Tendulkar’s repertoire. Tendulkar’s special genius lay in the impossible shots he hit off perfectly good balls.

Impossible because he made those shots look safe, even plausible, when they were not.

Those inside-out off-drives with which he neutered Warne in their first encounter in India; the upper cuff ramped over slips that he used against Ntini; the lofted straight hit with a straight bat, all torque and timing; the trajectory-defying flick that whipped the off-stump ball through mid-wicket, the perpendicular paddle-sweep, these were dangerous shots, methodically and safely played.

There were the essays in self-denial, the shots not played: McGrath left alone, time and time again, inches outside the off-stump; the Sydney double century, starring an absent cover drive, the dour hundred in Chepauk against Waugh’s Invincibles that helped win us the series: no movie about Tendulkar, not even a make-believe one, can ignore his defensive genius.

The innings that I think of most often was played in a losing cause. It is the 136 against the Pakistanis in Chepauk. Tendulkar, ten years into his career, played an innings of ferocious intent against a fine Pakistani attack led by the inventor of the doosra, Saqlain Mushtaq.

He was defeated by a spasming back but it was the reception of this agonizing defeat by the Chepauk crowd, the ovation they gave the Pakistanis, that made his innings and that match exceptional.

Tendulkar’s most stirring battles were fought against great antagonists— Wasim, Waqar, Saqlain, Donald, McGrath, Warne, Kallis, Lara, Ponting, Inzamam—and alongside great comrades: Azhar, Kapil, Kumble, Dravid, Laxman et al. So Tendulkar, the Movie, has to be a multi-starrer. My home movie has him cutting McDermot to ribbons in Perth in gloating slow motion and it ends with him walking back to the pavilion in Cape Town, dismissed by an astonishing catch by Adam Bacher. The soundtrack, stolen from Chariots of Fire, unsubtly underscores the brotherhood of greatness to which Tendulkar belongs. First amongst equals if you like, just not the BCCI’s tin god: a very great man, amongst other great men.

The writer is an essayist.