Sydney, June 26: It is hard to assess a fellow’s character in an interview lasting 40 minutes, which is the amount of time I have been allotted with Sachin Tendulkar – and properly privileged I feel to get it, too.
But I am afforded a useful insight before the interview even starts. We are in the Opus store near Covent Garden, where Tendulkar has been the subject of an interminable photo shoot as part of the launch of his latest website.
On the pavement outside there is an ever-burgeoning group of Indians pressing their noses to the glass, astounded to find that their country’s supreme sporting mega-star is inside. As soon as the shoot is over, Tendulkar is ushered over to meet me. But with a shy smile he apologises and instead steps out of the shop door to meet the people who would lie in the middle of a motorway for him. Only once he has chatted to them all does he return to my waiting tape-recorder. He is famously diddy, only 5ft 5in tall. But a giant of a man, nonetheless.
Also, he happens to have scored more Test centuries against Australia than anyone, so with the Ashes series imminent it seems relevant to ask him the secret of mastering the Aussie attack, but first things first. He is 36 now, and has been playing first-class cricket for more than 20 years. Is he beginning to contemplate life after cricket?
“To be honest I haven’t thought about that at all,” he says. “I’m still enjoying it, my body is holding up nicely, and I have no plans to stop playing. When I do, I will do something connected with cricket.
That’s what I’m good at.” Good at! It is like saying that Helen of Troy was a bit of a looker. Tendulkar has scored more Test runs than anyone in the history of the game, 12,773 of them at an average of 54.58. He also has a record number of one-day international runs, 16,684 at 44.37. Nobody has scored more Test centuries (42).
He has even claimed almost 200 Test and one-day wickets. Moreover, when Sir Donald Bradman was persuaded in 1998 to pick his all-time XI, the Little Master from Mumbai was the only modern inclusion. But what will he do with all that talent when the curtain finally falls on one of the epic cricket careers? Will he coach? “I don’t know,” he says flatly. “This is not the right time to think about it.”
–Agencies