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They first met at the age of 13 and went on to form one of the all-time greatest ODI opening pairs. As Sachin Tendulkar is playing his last Test, former teammate and captain Sourav Ganguly pays tribute to him in an exclusive interview with INN Live.
Sachin and I go back a long way. The first time I met him was at an under-14 camp at Indore, when both of us were 13 years old. The first thing I noticed about the curly-haired boy from Mumbai was that he just loved to bat. He was the first at the nets and just kept batting. Such was his passion and intensity that Vasu sir (Vasu Paranjpe, who was conducting the camp) had to occasionally pull him out to give others a chance. At the camp itself, it was apparent that he was blessed with special talent.
We were roommates during India’s tour of Australia in 1992 and I remember his actions in Sydney on the night before he got his first hundred in Australia. Sachin didn’t sleep a wink. He kept telling me where he’d hit Craig McDermott and the others! By midnight I was asleep, leaving him to his devices.
The next day he told me in the dressing room that he was severely sleep-deprived and would snooze on the dining table. I was to wake up him up at the fall of the next wicket. Sachin was batting at number six and I woke him up when Azhar got out. He said he was feeling refreshed. It was strange how he could just sleep on top of a dining table and then go out and play an amazing innings of 148 not out!
However, his best of the series was yet to come. It came at Perth in what was then easily the fastest wicket in the world. Sachin’s height made it more difficult for him because with the exaggerated bounce on the track, it was impossible for a short man to get forward to the pitch of the ball. Yet he managed to play shots in front of the wicket. I can say with certainty that it was the best innings of his career. To score a hundred on that wicket against the Australian attack was simply sensational. Most of our other batsmen weren’t even able to put bat on ball and here was an 18-year-old putting together a real batting masterclass.
I was dropped after the Australia tour and it was only in 1996 that Sachin and I got together in England. I had batted well in the tour games leading up to the Tests and he came up to me one day to say my opportunity would soon be coming. I hadn’t played the first Test and though he got a hundred at Edgbaston we lost the match to go down 0-1. It was in the second Test that I got my opportunity. I was to bat at three while Sachin was at No. 4. We were both not out overnight in our first innings and he kept telling me to play straight and get behind the line of the ball.
Next morning he got out to a peach from Chris Lewis while I managed to get to a century. At tea when I went back to the dressing room my bat had started to make a creaky sound as a result of the pounding it had taken. Sachin came up to me and said that I should drink my tea while he’d tape up my bat so that I could keep playing with it through the innings. At the end of the day he said it was just a start and I should not give it away. It was unbelievable how involved he was with the game at all times.
It was during this tour that Sachin started addressing me as ‘Dadi’ while I started calling him “Chhoto Babu’. He noticed that I was often tense and started talking to me in pidgin Bangla to make me laugh and ease my tension. Throughout our careers, he would make it a point to talk me in broken Bangla. The day I retired, he said, “Whom will I speak to in Bengali now?”
Having batted together for years, I found him always open to suggestion. This willingness to adjust distinguishes him from others. He would often advise me and on many occasions cautioned me from trying to play too many shots on the off side. We could read each other’s mind and that made batting together really enjoyable.
I also had the privilege of captaining him for many years and I could go and on about him but I will restrict myself to one incident. This was during the 2003 World Cup in South Africa. Pakistan scored a challenging 273 at Centurion. As we walked back, I asked Sachin if we should have a team talk. He was clear we shouldn’t.
He said we were already playing very well and there was no need to disturb the momentum. Talk would only end up confusing the boys. I dropped the idea and left it to him to go out there and do the needful. Needless to say, he did. It was definitely the tournament’s most high-pressure encounter and he delivered when it mattered the most.
Now that Sachin is retiring, there’s much talk about his legacy. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t seen Bradman but Sachin is as close to perfection as you can get. His insatiable hunger combined with incredible talent makes him a real genius. When people criticize him, all I say is ‘100 international hundreds’. Can you imagine the hunger of a player who has scored 100 international centuries? He leaves nothing to chance. That’s why I will always say that Lara was a great and Ponting too was brilliant but Sachin, without any hesitation, is a step higher then the rest.
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