Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Is Sachin an all-time great?

Questions about Tendulkar's place in the Indian team have been making the rounds in recent times. Though his ODI form has been awesome, he has been making insignificant contributions in Tests since his 35th Test century. The debate about his place in the team finally came to a crescendo when he was boo-ed by this home crowd at his home ground. The immediate reaction to this incident all-round has been that Sachin is an all-time great batsman and what the crowd did at Wankhede was disrespectful, not recognizing Sachin's yeoman service to the nation over the years, ignorant of his place in history, etc. etc. ...

In light of this, an interesting discussion cropped up today on one of Cricinfo's blogs whether there is any Test match that Sachin can claim to have owned. The author of the post, Gaurav Sabnis, cites 3 examples of other Indian batsmen owning a Test - Laxman at Kolkata, Dravid at Adelaide, and Sehwag at Multan. But, as one of the commenters points out, in these 3 instances, Dravid, Laxman and Sachin played stellar supporting roles.

So, are there any instances at all when a batsman has single-handedly taken his team across the victory line in a non-trivial fourth innings chase or a third innings comeback? If not, maybe we are expecting too much from Sachin?

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nope, we are not expecting too much from Sachin. We are expecting him to score some runs in the 4th innings of a test, which he has failed to do time and again.

Sehwag suffers from the same problem and if two of our batsmen consistently fail in the 4th innings, we can't win batting 2nd.

4:48 PM  
Blogger Harsha V. Madhyastha said...

Well, we can only hope that Sachin erases that blemish from his record in one of the matches on the tours of WI and SA. I am sure he'll have several opportunities on these tours ;)

I don't have much hope of Sehwag improving on his 4th innings record ...

5:01 PM  
Blogger nice try said...

forget 4th innings .. let him do something worthwhile to actually justify his place in the team .. deadweight!

8:36 PM  
Blogger Octa said...

Matcha the home crowd was booing the opposition da. Twas the media that distorted this according to many junta @ the stadium...

11:18 PM  

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