India’s star batsman is as happy piling up runs in Cuttack as scoring a century at Lord’s

One of the advantages of having a partner who isn’t especially interested in sport comes in the form of observations that are stripped bare of the fake patinas that we aficionados love to add on. Soon after Sachin Tendulkar’s unbeaten 96 had guided India to the easiest of victories in Cuttack, I was thinking out loud: “How does he still motivate himself to go to such venues and score runs?” She looked perplexed for a moment. “Don’t people go to watch the games there?” she asked. “Do they pay less money to get in?”

Touché. When you follow a sport like cricket, steeped in tradition, it’s easy to succumb to what I call the Houses-of-the-Holy syndrome. When a batsman makes a century or a bowler bowls a game-changing spell at a venue like Lord’s, the MCG, Eden Gardens, the Wanderers or the Kensington Oval, there’s a tendency to imbue it with mythical qualities. A hundred made at the Barabati Stadium or the Arbab Niaz in Peshawar isn’t viewed in quite the same rose-tinted way.

Tendulkar, though, scoffs at this particular form of snobbery. For years now, he has been a disciple of the first commandment that the great Bill Shankly preached; that it’s “their [the players'] privilege to play for you [the fans]“. Unlike the big-time Charlies who came to English football and became mice among men during trips to the wintry wastes of Wearside and north Lancashire, he has made it his business to score runs wherever he goes.

His 45 one-day hundreds have been distributed across 31 different venues, with Colombo’s Premadasa Stadium having been witness to four, including his first way back in 1994. The 43 Test centuries have been spread across 30 venues. Apart from the absence of a Test hundred in Zimbabwe and a limited-overs one in the Caribbean, there are no gaps in the résumé.

In 2009, despite India’s threadbare Test schedule and being absent from a few one-day games, he has already amassed 1,505 runs, 964 of them in coloured clothes. Each of the three one-day centuries has been memorable. The 163 not out in Christchurch lit the touchpaper Read more…

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