If you happen to meet Sachin Tendulkar, perhaps in George Street, Sydney, this weekend wish him good luck but please don't mention that century. He ought to be in batsman's heaven but in truth he must feel he is starring in a nightmare. He is at the top of his game even though he is 38, an age for a top sportsman to rest the feet. Instead he is still harnessed to cricket, scoring runs aplenty but not at the right time or in the right measured quantities.
At the same time India, the team he has led, who need his full attention and rely on him to be world champions are in trouble. They must win Tests if they are to climb back to the top of the tree where they rested from the moment Australia lost Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne and reverted to ordinary.
Corner of his mind Australia can beat India but only because Tendulkar has in a corner of his mind the need to score one more hundred, his 100th in international cricket. That is the record that will distinguish him from all other cricketers, set him apart in a world that relishes the numbers game.
More to the point, if he had one more century his mind would be free, he could concentrate on the considerable feat of getting India to a first innings total that would allow them to climb back into the Test series Down Under. As things are, whenever he thinks he has the right sort of a start, or the runs seem to come easily, or his stars are in the appropriate place in the astrological heaven, along comes a ferocious fast bowler like Peter Siddle and knocks out his off stump.
It happened at the MCG on the second evening of the first Test when Tendulkar was comfortable in his own crease and Australia looked ripe for the plucking. Major turning point Instead, after Tendulkar had made top score in the second innings — 32 out of 169 Australia won and, Sachin knows better than anyone else, his fist innings dismissal on 73 was certainly a major cause. So he makes 100 runs in the match when all around him are failing and he gets the blame for their defeat.
Where is justice in that? It has been this way since he made his 99th hundred on March 12 against South Africa in the World Cup and in the nine months since he has scored 94 against West Indies and 91 against England. But that is not enough. It is a sequence that will satisfy most batsmen but Tendulkar is not ordinary. He is to many a god and in the minds of many more a legend; Bradman, Richards, Hammond and Lara are among the few who can be compared with him.
Ever since the two of them joined the ranks of the immortals at about the same time his feats have been rated alongside Brian Lara's. Now, at the moment he has outlasted Lara, gone on when Lara has quit, he must wish that he has done what Lara did in the last 20 years, and broken the world Test record twice with 375 and 400 and set the first class mark at 501.
Instead of sitting in the middle of a Caribbean island, contented, rich, retired and happy like Lara, Tendulkar may also have enough money and happiness but he must carry on aiming for a target that everyone expects him to reach and mentions to him every time they cross his path. Galling? You bet. So the next time you see him, wish him well but don't mention the hundred. Believe me, he will be grateful and, believe me, it will come.
