Sachin Tendulkar a superhero for our times

SITTING in a Bangalore stadium after a pulsating World Cup match, the incredible scrutiny of elite Indian cricketers hit home.

Indian batting maestro Sachin Tendulkar acknowledges the crowd at the MCG in his last tour of Australia in 2011-12

SITTING in the bowels of the M. Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore, after a pulsating World Cup match between England and India, really brought home to me, for the first time, the incredible scrutiny that the masters of the India cricket team must live with every day of their lives.

The moment concerned Sunil Gavaskar, Sachin Tendulkar's cricketing hero. We were waiting for the production crew's bus to take us home and some India supporters got whiff that Gavaskar was sitting there, alone but for my company and one other. These supporters rushed in, knelt prostrate before him, and began to kiss his feet. "They only do that to Gavaskar and Tendulkar," Sanjay Manjrekar, the third of our group, said, "but they do it to Tendulkar most of all."

The ability to cope with the kind of fame visited upon very few has been at the heart of Tendulkar's greatness, which has seen him score more Test runs and more Test hundreds than anyone in the history of the game, and enjoy the fifth longest career.

Longevity brings inevitable records but the span of Tendulkar's international career, almost a quarter of a century by the time his 200th Test match will be complete, is remarkable when you think that none of those who have played longer did so in modern times, under the glare of the modern media.

Two decades of wearying scrutiny - every utterance pored over (which is why there have been so few of note) and every move analysed. Yet, scarcely a false turn: no scandalous stories, no Tiger-like demons lurking (as far as we are aware), just an uncanny ability to focus on scoring runs day after day. In all conditions, against allcomers and in all forms of the game.

Tendulkar is India's original sporting megastar. Mahendra Singh Dhoni might have overtaken him in earning power, but even he must bend his knee to Tendulkar's iconic status. There was Kapil Dev, of course, and Gavaskar, both there when India won the World Cup in 1983, the moment that began India's long awakening to the charms of one-day cricket, but neither of their careers coincided, as Tendulkar's has done almost to perfection, with the rise of India as an economic superpower.

This has been Tendulkar's great fortune, as well as a great burden. As if it was written in the stars: the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the advent of satellite television to cover the game, both tied into the burgeoning spending power of a growing middle class, arrived with Tendulkar.

For some, this has not been a coincidence and has imbued Tendulkar in the eyes many of his countrymen with a kind of status that transcends mere sport - almost as if his deeds on the cricket field were the cause of such a national transformation.

A burden for sure, but it allowed for the creation of a cricketing brand: sponsorship deals across every imaginable product that have brought him incredible wealth. No cricketing body has better exploited cricket's commercial capacity in the past few years than the BCCI, and of course, if Twenty20 was invented in England, it was commercialised in India through the Indian Premier League. But none of this would have been possible without Tendulkar, and his advisers, showing the way.

It is to his great credit that none of the glitz or glamour, none of the commercial tie-ups and none of the celebrity undermined the substance of his career as an international cricketer.

In that sense, and probably the only sense, there is a similarity with the other iconic cricketer of the age, Shane Warne. They handled the fame in contradictory ways, but for both performance was everything. For some of the most troubled cricketers, and the greats, there has always been the feeling that the actual playing arena was the place they could relax the most, untouchable.

The span of Tendulkar's career has seen remarkable changes in the game. International cricket has become challenged by franchise cricket; Test cricket challenged by, first, one-day and then Twenty20 cricket. Yet Tendulkar's game, the art and craft of his batting, has not changed at all. I played in the game when, aged just 17, he scored his maiden Test hundred and in essence he remains the same player now. Of course, the eyesight might have dimmed a little and the reflexes slowed, but he uses the same classical, simple method that he has always used. For nearly 25 years, he has been the gold standard. The batsman against whom all others are measured.

The Times