Twenty Four Years Ago Today

It was the 5th ball of the 92nd over of India’s innings. I was sitting in front of the TV, a pack of ice pinned to my cheek, but utterly forgotten, nursing the consequences of the surgical extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. The television was on mute, as it has invariably been in my house when the cricket is on.

Saqlain Mushtaq was bowling. Sachin Tendulkar, batting on 136 on a wearing Chepauk pitch which had endured near four full days (and 323 overs by then) of battle had been taking liberties after playing watchfully for most of the day. He’d come to bat with India on 6/2, chasing 271. He’d watched from the other end as it became 82/5 after Saurav Ganguly was given out caught at silly point to a bump ball. Wasim Akram had swung the new ball. He would also swing the old one when the time came. Saqlain Mushtaq was bowling dreamy off-spin interspersed with a few well chosen doosras. Waqar Younis was fast, straight and relentless. 271 looked impossibly far away.

But, accompanied by Nayan Mongia (and then Sunil Joshi), Tendulkar found himself on 136, and India 17 away with three wickets in hand. It was a study in risk and survival. His first 50 runs had taken him 136 balls. His hundred, 235 balls. His last 36 runs, only 38 balls. For much of the innings, Tendulkar had scored from nudges and deflections. The hard hitting was limited to square cuts and pulls when the spinners dropped it short, and sweeps when the off-spinner drifted down the leg side. There was the odd straight drive against the fast bowler, but Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were sidelights that day. There had been a few bat pad chances which, today, would have resulted in DRS reviews. But that day, the only DRS was of Dunne and Ramaswamy.

As the score mounted, so did Tendulkar’s willingness to take chances. On 90, he’d run down the pitch to Saqlain, been beaten in the flight and nearly been bowled. Moin Khan failed to collect the ball and missed the stumping with Tendulkar several yards down the wicket.

On 136, Tendulkar tried once too often to deposit Saqlain over mid-on. Wasim Akram judged the catch perfectly. India were 7 down with only 17 to get. Sunil Joshi had played well at the other end. They managed only 4 more, to lose by 12 runs.

Despite the missed stumping, Tendulkar kept stepping out to Saqlain to smash him straight down the wicket. He scored a few boundaries. But he was taking chances on a wearing pitch. Even then, I remember wondering about the wisdom of those risks. You see, in the late nineties, Tendulkar made you believe that there was such a thing as risk-free run accumulation at any speed.

I’ve rationalized that lofted shot in many ways over the years.

He played it because his back problems were acting up and he wanted to get as many of the required runs as he could before it became impossible for him to continue.

He saw it tossed up, and instead of the single, saw an opportunity to deposit it for his 19th four (or his first six), before tapping the last ball for a single. This seemed to me to be unwise - it had not been a chanceless innings - it was not that kind of pitch, or that kind of bowling. But then, this was Tendulkar. And not just any Tendulkar, but the Tendulkar of the nineties for whom the trade-off between speed and certainty was often no trade-off at all.

Over the years, I’ve settled on a simple explanation. To score runs quickly, a batter has to take chances. And sometimes, those chances don’t come off. 91.5 was one such chance.

And yet, I often think back to that day. Of sitting on the couch, with the bag of ice dripping down my cheek onto my shirt, oblivious to the poor cotton ball getting mauled inside my jaw. I remember my eyes lighting up, as Tendulkar’s must surely have done, as Saqlain tossed that one up on middle-and-leg despite having gone for boundaries earlier in the over, and Tendulkar’s hefty bat-swing catching only some of it. As the camera switched to Wasim Akram tracking back to complete the catch, Australian style, I remember wishing that he would fall over. Akram judged the catch to nicety.

Nothing since has caused me to endure a surgery like that troublesome, sideways wisdom tooth. There hasn’t been an innings which I remember as vividly either.

For a part of my cricketing memory, Tendulkar is facing up to that fifth ball of the 92nd over, standing still on his leg stump guard. Saqlain tosses it up on middle and leg, and Tendulkar gently sweeps it away fine for a single. Joshi blocks the last ball of the over with 16 required. There are countless other sequences I’ve imagined over the years.

Had Tendulkar’s innings really been completed in the countless ways that I’ve imagined it ending, with Tendulkar not out 151, would I remember it as well? (He always ends up there in my alternative universes, whether he’s scoring studiously off the back foot against Saqlain and driving imperiously against Waqar, or whether he’s stepping out twice to deposit Saqlain for two sixers. Never 152 or an even 150, or even 153, and obviously never less than 150. Always 151.) I doubt it. After all, I don’t remember his 103* against England at Chepauk nine years later nearly as well. That was a 4th innings, a great chase, and a succesful century.

Among the many battles fought (and won in a few cases) by the rebel confederates in the American Civil War, perhaps none is as famous as the the Battle of Gettysburg. Lee’s rebels lost at Gettysburg. In the self-serving mythology which was built up in the Jim Crow South about that rebellion against the abolition of slavery, the great Southern writer William Faulkner wrote, perhaps, the most famous lines ever written in fiction about the American Civil War in one of his lesser known novels Intruder in the Dust. Of the doomed Southern assault which came to be known as Pickett’s Charge Faulkner wrote,

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances...”

So it is, with that 5th ball of the 92nd over, and me.