Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar

By: Dilip D’souza

Description

The most famous cricketer in the world is my neighbour. And he has just retired from the game.

He told us he would do so a couple of months ago, and that galvanized India’s cricket administration into hurriedly organizing a two-Test series against the West Indies.

The great man’s last two matches.

Not for Sachin an away series to round off a career. How then would his adoring millions of fans say goodbye? Not for him either a strong team that would truly test his skills. Perhaps we have to maximize his chances of going out in style, perhaps of him scoring his 101st international century. So we got the West Indies, a shadow of the great West Indian teams of the past, and minus a few of their best players anyway. Lambs to the slaughter, really. But incidental. For this was the Sachin show, evident from long before the first ball was bowled. The press was filled with the Sachin legacy, articles by friends and acquaintances, interviews with fellow cricketers, on and on.

And at the stadium itself, the crowd, the signs, the announcements, the functions and the electronic displays only underlined the point. EPW magazine asked me to write an essay about the match for them, but from the stands. From that moment, I began thinking there was actually a book here.

The story of this last Test told as a closely-observed game of cricket, but really as a vehicle to examine a whole gamut of related themes: the game of cricket, Sachin’s 24-year career and the way the game has changed in that time, the parallels to a changing India in that time, the clout today of the BCCI, the rise of the IPL and T20 cricket, the easy equation of cricket to nationalism, the placing of Sachin on a pedestal…

About the author

Dilip D’Souza (born 1960) is a Mumbai-based writer and journalist. He writes about social and political causes. His columns have appeared in The Sunday Observer, Rediff.com, Outlook, Mid-Day, Hindustan Times, indiatogether.org, The Caravan and other publications.

A column written by him about how two young engineers from Kerala who built a dam in rural Maharashtra and supplied electricity is believed to have inspired a key segment of the 2004 movie Swades directed by Ashutosh Gowariker.