Sport gives us all a chance to relive our ancient days - days when our ancestors got together in tribes and waged wars on each other, days when everyone from our tribe is a brother and everyone from the other tribe is a foe, days when today’s deep-seated philosophies of ’us against them’ took root in our genes. Sport gives us an outlet to wage wars on each other, albeit on a playing field as opposed to the battlefield, and the parallels between sport and life are there for all to see. So it is no wonder, then, that we are on a constant lookout for heroes when we watch sport. A sportsman who stages a come-from-behind win appeals to us, for he reminds us of the fighting hero who, refusing to accept defeat, rises from the ashes to vanquish his enemy.
So we let out a sigh of wonder when Patrick Rafter decided enough was enough and staged a remarkable comeback to beat Andre Agassi at the US Open (which year? I forget), we celebrated when Manchester United, in a crazy three minute period, netted the ball twice and clinched the UEFA Champions League Trophy from Bayern Munich in 1999, and we wept with joy when VVS Laxman played ’that innings’ to turn a series on its head. Our yearning for heroes runs so deep that we manage to find a hero in a team game, we celebrate his success, we heap on him the credit for the victory, and we go to bed, hoping for more heroes to arise the next day.
But alas, we forget that there are lesser heroes in a team game, lesser not in the sense their contribution was lesser, but in that they were doing the groundwork, behind the scenes, away from the spotlight. So every time we think of ’that innings’ in Calcutta, we also forget that there was another innings played by another batsman from the other end, an innings of 180 by a certain Rahul Dravid, giving rise to a partnership worth 376. There was also one Harbhajan Singh who took 6-73 in the second innings of that match. It was, by no means, a single-handed effort, though hindsight tells a different story.
I can give you many examples of such games. Adelaide, 2003. Those two words have become synonymous with ’Rahul Dravid’. Who can forget his mammoth 233 to get us close to Australia’s 556? Who could argue with the 72* he conjured up in the second innings as we stumbled our way towards the target? But let’s not forget Ajit Agarkar’s 6/41 in the Australian second innings, let’s not forget VVS Laxman’s 148 in the first innings, and let’s not forget to shudder when we think of what would have happened had Gilchrist latched on to Dravid’s outside edge in the second innings. Single-handed effort? Hardly.
So whenever I come across a point of view that Sachin Tendulkar never scores runs when the team needs them most, I am always tempted to ask, ’Pardon me, but can you give me an example of a situation when a team does NOT need runs from a batsman?’. An example of a situation where we can say ’Alright Sachin, we don’t need runs from you today, we don’t mind if you get out’ will go a long way towards settling this debate. That is the power of hindsight. It is easy to say after a match where the turning point was, but no one seems to be able to do it DURING the match.
Let us go back to 2001 to ’that series’ again. We all remember that third game, don’t we? Harbhajan and Dighe scrambling that couple to win the match and the series, the whole country erupting in joy, aah, who can forget? The hero of the match? Harbhajan, of course, with his match haul of 15 wickets there can hardly be any other. That surely was a single-handed performance. But wait, do I see the number 126 next to this guy Sachin Tendulkar on the batting sheet? Naw, it must be my imagination! The turning point in that game, for me, was when Damien Martyn dropped him when he was 70-odd. Again, that shudder down the spine.
Mumbai, 2004. Tendulkar and Laxman stringed together the partnership of the match of which Tendulkar’s contribution was 52. That was a match-winning knock. Multan saw Virender Sehwag get a triple but also saw Tendulkar get 194*. That was a match-winning knock. In Headingly, he scored 193 in a total of 628 with Dravid and Ganguly getting hundreds too. A match-winning effort by anyone’s book. And I haven’t yet gone beyond 2001 or to the one-dayers!
A batsman’s job is to score runs, and a team ALWAYS needs runs from its batsmen. So the most consistent batsman is the most valuable to the team, and consistency is reflected in a batsman’s average. Compare the averages of all our batsmen and it is clear who our most valuable and most consistent batsmen are. They are Tendulkar, Dravid and Sehwag in that order. In a team game, it often happens that there is more than one hero, and I have attempted to show that Tendulkar has had a hand in some of our most memorable victories. And please, for the last time, we were chasing 360 in that world cup final!! We lost that game in the first innings when Zaheer and Srinath sprayed it around like children lost in disneyland, not when Tendulkar got out.
Phew.