Sachin Tendulkar

Brad Hogg bowling to Sachin Tendulkar

“He hit my best ball for six,” Hogg said. Yes – and you get the impression that Sachin Tendulkar could quite easily hit any delivery he chooses for a boundary. He’s only holding back so that Hogg doesn’t get taken off.

He and VVS Laxman got a bit carried away at one point though and carted Hogg for 18 off an over. Too greedy. They forced Ponting to bring, er, Michael Clarke back into the attack.

We’re full of admiration for Sachin Tendulkar. If we were in his position we’d go foetal and weep. That would be at the point of exiting the bed first thing as well. If we made it to the crease in a Test match, we’d adopt the same position only we’d try to dig a huge hole to hide in using only our face.

Cricketers are often at risk of dehydration, but not normally as a direct result of copious tears of surrender.

Sachin Tendulkar’s helium-filled bat

Everyone knows about Dennis Lillee’s aluminium bat, but Sachin Tendulkar’s experiment with a helium-filled bat is less well known.

Sachin thought the lightness of the bat would allow him to bat freer and longer, but unfortunately, as this picture shows, the excess of helium rendered the bat unusable.

During the course of his career, Philip Tufnell experimented with 32 different types of unconventional bat. He never once made contact with the ball though.

An unbeaten Tendulkar hundred – everything is as it should be

Up here in the northern hemisphere we need a bit of comfort at this time of year; something warm and familiar to let us know that all’s right in the world and the status quo persists.

That’s ‘status quo’ and not ‘Status Quo’, you understand. Francis Rossi et al. have never been much of a mental crutch for us, even in our darkest days. Like that time when we were out of teabags and couldn’t find our wallet. Where were our denim-clad saviours then, eh? Strutting around playing 12-bar blues standards in Sunderland, that’s where. Useless.

No, the warm glow of familiarity comes instead from Sachin Tendulkar. For the last 750 years Sachin’s been hitting hundreds and he’s not stopping now. We don’t care that it’s a pitch so flat that tail-enders are scoring fifties at will. We’re just reassured that Sachin Tendulkar can still be bothered.

India get home

It may have got to 93-3 chasing 200, but with Sachin Tendulkar there, it never really felt in doubt. The man’s a pro.

Shoaib Akhtar did his best, taking 4-58, but this was the right result. If India’s tailenders had managed to stick around for even a moment in their first innings, it could have been so much more straightforward.

So now the players get three whole days off before the second Test in Kolkata. Remember kids – if there’s more than two days in between, they’re not back-to-back Tests. That extra day should at least allow Misbah-ul-Haq plenty of time to come up with some even more ingenious ways of getting dismissed.

Sachin Tendulkar tries to camouflage his brilliance

Well we’re onto you, young Sachin Tendulkar. Just because some young tyro hasn’t learned to turn fifties into hundreds, doesn’t mean we won’t spot real talent when it stares us in the face. This lad’s one to watch.

India beat Pakistan in the fourth one-day international and in so doing took the series with one match left to play. Sachin Tendulkar hit 97, which is now the sixth time he’s been out in the nineties in 20 innings. Here’s the fifth.

This two digit habit partially obscures the fact that Sachin ‘not the batsman he was’ Tendulkar has scored over a thousand runs at an average of 50 since the end of the World Cup. Now only Michael Bevan – who just about never got out – and his statistically aberrant and statistically abhorrent successor, Mike Hussey, have ever averaged more than that in one-day cricket.

Obviously, Sachin Tendulkar would expect to keep up with the top batsmen, if not outstrip them, but the point is that he’s playing just about as well as ever. Cautious and muted in Test cricket – put Tendulkar in the one-day game and all his strokes are still there.

He’s not even 35 yet. Australia would only just be giving him his debut. That’s today’s link that’s actually worth clicking, by the way. We know we put a lot in. We like to give you options.

Sachin Tendulkar – nervous in the nineties?

No-one in the history of cricket – NO-ONE – has scored more international hundreds than Sachin Tendulkar. 78 times he’s got into three figures. 78! That’s loads! So why in the name of all that is good and pure is he suddenly getting out in the nineties all time?

In his last 18 one-day international innings, Sachin has been out in the nineties no fewer than five times. Three of those occasions he has been stranded on 99. Now there are precisely 99 scores that are worse than 99 (think before you comment), but the following run’s quite an important one.

Clearly he’s past it.

(We never get rage-fuelled, badly-spelt comments any more.)

Sachin Tendulkar is still miles better than everyone – especially you

Ian Bell is one of England’s better one-day batsmen. He’s quite experienced now having played 53 one-day internationals. During this time he’s hit 1,854 runs. That’s a lot of runs. You’ll never hit that many.

However, Ian Bell is a shrimp, a gnat, or even an atom when compared to Sachin Tendulkar. 1,854 runs is a lot, but Sachin Tendulkar’s hit 1,828 boundaries in one-day internationals. That’s just ludicrous.

During the Test series, Tendulkar looked a faded, jaded batsman. Still international standard, but a more thoughtful, cautious run-scorer. During this one-day series, he’s looked unstoppable. How opening the batting can be so trouble-free, we don’t know, but it is if you’re Sachin Tendulkar.

We wish we were Sachin Tendulkar. Sure, people would look at us and speak to us – two of our least favourite experiences – but it’d be worth it just to spank a couple of balls to the boundary and saunter around as a living god for a little while.