Showing posts with label sachin in australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sachin in australia. Show all posts

Tendulkar Is The Only in-form Indian Batsman: Warner

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Swashbuckling Australian opener David Warner says Sachin Tendulkar is the only in-form batsman in a struggling Indian line-up in the ongoing Test series but he expects the rest to show some aggression in the fourth and final match starting January 24.



"There might be a lot of people in their shed wondering how they're going to score runs," the 25-year-old, who struck a match-winning century in the third Test in Perth, was quoted as saying by the The Australian Associated Press.


"In my mind there is probably only one player (in form) and that's Sachin Tendulkar who looks like he's using a sight screen when he comes out to bat.


"But the other players, they're all world-class players. You look at the amount of runs they've got in the top six in their careers. It's phenomenal. We are expecting them to show some aggression in this next Test," he said.


Tendulkar has had a couple of half centuries during the series, which India trail 0-3, but he continues to chase an elusive 100th international hundred.


In fact, India are a team in crisis after seven back-to-back Test losses on foreign soil and Warner said the Aussies would aim to make it eight in a row.


"As Michael Clarke said the other day after the game (in Perth), celebrate your win but at the end of the day we want to try and beat the second team in the world four-nil," Warner said.


"That's a massive thing for us at the moment. Our goal is to become number one again by the next Ashes in 2013. If we can keep working towards that, our goals will be achieved," he added.


Warner, who had a verbal spat with Indian pacer Ishant Sharma during the Perth Test, said some banter is expected as players from both sides are passionate about representing their nations.


"When you come to a series like Australia against India you're playing for your countries. The competition on the field is exactly what it is. We are all about playing for Australia, they are all about playing for India," Warner said.


"There is always be going to be a bit of banter on the field and then off the field you're going to be mates. That's the way it should be. You've got to be warriors on the field and saints off it," he added.

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Sachin Tendulkar Boosted My Confidence: Umesh Yadav

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 India's young bowling sensation Umesh Yadav felt nervous bowling at the likes of Ricky Ponting in his first Test against Australia but said Sachin Tendulkar's advice hugely boosted his confidence as he scalped three crucial wickets on the opening day on Monday. 


Yadav was seen to get a lot of encouragement from Tendulkar at mid-off or mid-on and the young fast bowler said the Indian legend told him to bowl fuller length deliveries to get wickets. 




"Even against West Indies, at mid off or mid-on, he just boosts my confidence. He does not tell me anything particular, just asks me to bowl in my areas. He told me that in India you could get away by bowling back of length stuff. Here in Australia, it's important to bowl a fuller length," Yadav told reporters at the press conference after first day's play. 


Yadav said he was happy to have taken the most wickets for the visitors but was disappointed that he gave away far too many runs. 


"I took wickets but also gave away far too many runs. So I'm happy and I'm not happy as well," said Yadav who took three wickets for 96 runs for his day's effort. 


Yadav was pulled often by Australian batsmen, especially in the post lunch session when both Ponting and opener Ed Cowan had a go at him, and he said he bowled short balls to contain the batsmen. 


"It's not that I wanted to bowl short or the team has planned so. The two fielders in the deep, at fine leg and square leg, were intended to keep the scoring down more than to catch the batsmen off a pull shot," he said. 




One of Yadav's victims was Ponting whom he claimed caught in the slips off an outswinger and he admitted he was a bit nervous initially bowling at the Australian legend. 


"I would not say any one wicket in particular was special. All wickets were special. I am touring Australia for the first time so whatever success comes my way would make me happy. In whatever way I could contribute for the team, I am happy I could do it," Yadav said. 


"It was exciting to bowl to Ponting. He has been such a big player. I wouldn't say I was very nervous but yes there was a little bit of nervousness," he said. 


Yadav said that overall India had a good day in office though Australia put together important 63-runs for the seventh wicket at the fag end of play on Monday. 




"Partnerships happen. We did try to break it but they kept going. Yes, we have conceded a few runs but otherwise the day was good for us," said Yadav.
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Little Master Sachin Tendulkar a Work Of Timeless Art

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GREAT players have a habit of setting records. Only very, very special ones actually invent them. Nobody dreamed of one hundred first-class centuries becoming a landmark until W. G. Grace made it conceivable. Likewise the milestone of one hundred international centuries- that is, until Sachin Tendulkar.


As Tendulkar set to scaling that summit, it seemed to shrink a little in proportion. That's another quality of the very, very special.


They recalibrate the world by their capabilities. Tendulkar is known colloquially as "The Little Master", but he is also a master of littling, of scaling achievements down so that they grow thinkable, permissible and achievable.


Combining five-day and one-day hundreds contains inevitably an inexactitude: it is like adding apples to oranges to obtain a count of fruit. But the century remains batting's most incorruptible unit of currency, with a lasting historic and cultural utility, and a century of centuries at the game's elite level has an undilutable whole-ness, like a round-the-world journey or a perfect smile: complete in itself, theoretically repeatable but essentially unimprovable.




You must factor in the distance travelled since the first, at Old Trafford in August 1990, when he looked so slight and tiny that a puff of wind might have blown him away even though England's attack could not.


You must contemplate how the world has changed since. When first Tendulkar toured this country 20 years ago, there were only seven Test nations (South Africa was excluded at that time), only two umpires per Test, and only home viewers saw replays.


Australia hosting India in a Test series, too, was considered an act of antipodean philanthropy, rather than an opportunity to line the vaults of Jolimont with gold bars as it is now.


So much has changed, and so little, because Tendulkar's game, for all its variations and iterations as years have passed, has remained instantly recognisable in its adherence to cricket's first principles and his unaltering sureness of touch.


You could stop a Tendulkar career showreel at any time and it would look like the acme of batting. Above all, contemplate the scale and intensity of the hopes that have accumulated around Tendulkar in the course of his career, greater than those heaped on any other cricketer in history.


Balzac once said he hankered for a fame that would permit him "to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing". Tendulkar breaking wind in society today would hit India like a monsoon.


It is one thing to become famous; quite another to stay famous, in a world more conducive to the perishable quality of celebrity. It is one thing to succeed; it is another to continually stave off failure and maintain a baseline excellence.


Here, then, is an epic of expertise and endurance, like the Mahabharata and Ramayana rolled into one. Tendulkar has become an exceedingly wealthy man between times, but in a sense because he has had to be - because that is the way aspirational, materialistic societies reward their heroes.


He has continued to understand value in a world obsessed with price, taking nothing not insistently offered, and in the totality of his career he will come out comfortably as a giver who is certain that cricket will be perennially in his debt. What comes after him will not be of the same character. In so altering the financial stakes of his game, in fact, Tendulkar has inadvertently insured it.


In their book The Business of Cricket (2010), Shyam Balasubramanian and Vijay Santhanam cite a table prepared by TAM Sports delineating "the Sachin Factor": that Tests and one-day internationals with Tendulkar playing outrate those in which he does not by a huge degree in 2010, by three to one. They also present a graphic they call "The Tendulkar Ecosystem", in the centre of which sits Sachin, sluicing value, financial and psychic, between Team India, fans, sponsors, media houses and state associations.


It looks, at first glance, exceedingly complex, but its essence is simple - because without one small man who enters his 40th year next April, it cannot work.


Want really to grasp Tendulkar's importance to the modern game? Try to imagine it without him.


The record on the brink of which he stands is in a sense an artefact already. Tendulkar came into his majority as the calendar was being glutted by forms of the game of a duration conducive to the compilation of hundreds.


It is virtually impossible to imagine his heirs and successors emulating him in playing on for approaching a quarter of a century, let alone facing international opponents in more than 600


games of at least a day in length.


Thanks to the ascendant of the Indian Premier League and Champions League, the next generation of cricketers are likely to play far more T20 for "clubs" and less international cricket for their countries.


The shortening of our pleasures has entailed a contraction in cricket's scope. It was always a possibility that there would never be another Tendulkar, but perhaps now there cannot be. He has constructed a career along the lines of one of Europe's great gothic cathedrals, built to last, guaranteed to serve future generations, full of splendour, grandeur, romance. And all cricket can now think of doing is surrounding that cathedral with lookalike apartments and trying to sell them at a huge mark-up.


In writing of the immediate post-Bradman era, Ray Robinson described Australian cricket as like a man bumping around a darkened room. Something similar looms today. Tendulkar is sui generis. To imagine another Tendulkar ranks in audacity with imagining him in the first place.


The effect of the end of Tendulkar's career will be particularly pronounced in cricket's richest and most populous market. Sixty-five per cent of India's population is younger than 35. They can recall no cricket without the Little Master.


When he retires, it will be for them not just the loss of a sporting hero but an intimation of mortality. That is as profound and expressive an idea as any record he may set, even the most remarkable
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Sachin Eyes 100th Ton In Melbourne Test

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Sachin Tendulkar has been stuck on 99 International centuries since March and despite coming close on a fair few occasions he has yet to score that elusive 100th ton. Now all of India hopes that he can recapture his best form when he takes to the field in Melbourne.




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Tour to Australia, A Feat for Sachin Tendulkar

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Sachin Tendulkar will embark on his fifth Test tour of Australia today, something that not many would have imagined four years ago. Remember the rousing ovation he got at the Adelaide Oval in 2008, the crowd presuming it was his last Test on Australian soil. 


Renowned writer Mike Coward even penned a sentimental piece on his potential farewell. "It is only right that Sachin Tendulkar should play his last Test match in Australia at Adelaide Oval for he has a very special affinity with this city of churches and Chappells and festivals. 


"For this was Don Bradman's hometown for 66 years and in 1998 India's little master came here especially to pay homage to the game's greatest batsman on his 90th birthday. "He will be 35 on April 24 (2008) and India is not scheduled to return here for Test matches before 2011-12," he wrote prior to the Adelaide Test. And yet Tendulkar returns to his beloved country for a fifth time, the first Indian to do so. 
Romance begins...


Ever since his first tour Down Under as an 18-year-old, Tendulkar has left Australians smitten with his strokeplay. The love affair began when he became the youngest to score a Test century in Australia on his first tour -- an unbeaten 148 at Sydney. After his exquisite Perth ton later on that tour, Merv Hughes cracked open a beer, turned to his captain, Allan Border and said: "This little prick's going to get more runs than you, AB." Border had 9,532 Test runs at the time -- the second highest in the history of the game after Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar. Hughes was on the button.


"I was there to witness those hundreds at Sydney and Perth in 1991-92. I was amazed how he adapted to those conditions so quickly, considering his age. The Perth hundred is still the best I've ever seen. There was prolonged bounce after the third day - a lot of cracks on the wicket. You could literally put a finger inside the crack. When the seam landed on the crack, the ball went wherever it pleased.


It was difficult to anticipate anything. This teenager walked in and showed everyone how to bat," said Dilip Vengsarkar, who previously held the Indian record for four Australia tours (1977-78, 1980-81, 1985-86 and 1991-1992). Vengsarkar was also part of the Indian team that won the 1985 World Championship of Cricket in Australia.


"He's done well everywhere in the world. But there's something about Australia. He likes the ball coming on to the bat. He enjoys those conditions like anything," he added.


'The Best' in Oz


Indeed, he does. In 16 Tests there, he has 1,522 runs at 58.53. Even Sir Vivian Richards (47.56), Brian Lara (41.97) and David Gower (44.48), who played a lot more Tests in Australia, didn't match Tendulkar's feats. In fact, Wally Hammond, Herbert Sutcliffe and VVS Laxman are the only visiting batsmen besides Tendulkar to average in excess of 50 in Australia (minimum qualification: 1,000 Test runs).


In his autobiography 'Standing My Ground', Matthew Hayden wrote that Australians were so much in love with Tendulkar that a special version of his 1998 blade was manufactured at a Brisbane factory. Irrefutably, Tendulkar is an icon in Australia.


In 2003-04, Tendulkar went through the leanest patch of his career. But the double century at SCG that summer was his way to reaffirm his love for Australia, a knock that many felt redeemed his career. "Tendulkar was having a quiet series, with just one 50. Before the Sydney Test, we talked about his batting, which didn't happen very often as he knew his own game inside out.


In Sydney, he decided he was going to keep it very tight; he wouldn't play through cover or square off the front foot because that was where he'd been getting out. Having formulated a plan, he went out and executed it, making 241 not out, his highest Test score (at the time), of which only 53 came on the off side. The word gets done to death, but this was an awesome display of technique and discipline. A month later his wife Anjali (Tendulkar's wife), who'd listen in our conversation, got in touch to say thanks for the chat in Sydney," former India coach John Wright wrote in 'Indian Summers'.


The Tendulkar-Australian love affair reached its pinnacle on the last tour. The boy was too young in 1992 and in 2008 doubts lingered that the man may be too old; it didn't matter to the man and like the boy he also reached Perth having made runs in Sydney -- this time a 154 not out. Tendulkar made an audacious 71 before falling to an unlucky lbw decision. He finished with 493 runs at 70.42; his best ever return from any series.


Help from a friend


Tendulkar had sought help from former India fast bowler Subroto Banerjee on that tour. "He was always a good friend, even before he started playing international cricket. I was playing club cricket in Australia at the time.
He called me and said, 'why don't you join us at the nets and help me out'.


I obliged immediately. I ended up travelling with the team for the entire Test series. The original plan was just to visit him in the nets once. "I did not regret travelling with the team as he played some of his best knocks on that tour.  If he calls me again, I will be glad to help him out," Banerjee told MiD DAY.


Six appeal


The below players have made six Test trips to Australia


Johnny Briggs (England)
1884-85, 1886-87, 1887-88, 1891-92, 1894-95, 1897-98
Total: 21 Tests


Colin Cowdrey (England)
1954-55, 1958-59, 1962-63, 1965-66, 1970-71, 1974-75
Total: 27 Tests


Bob Willis (England)
1970-71, 1974-75, 1976-77, 1978-79, 1979-80, 1982-83
Total: 24 Tests


Daniel Vettori (NZ)
1997-98, 2001-02, 2004-05, 2005-06, 2008-09, 2011-12
Total: 12 Tests
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