Sachin Tendulkar!

So many have written so much about this particular topic. It has been discussed to death! Yet each game the maestro plays the same question is asked of him. Even worse, he has to prove a point each time he goes to bat. It might be a cliche topic after all to write about but being an ardent fan of his, I thought I should. Lets get on with it. Statistics apart lets look at the genuine match winners India have produced! Other than Sachin Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Anil Kumble and to an extent Virender Sehwag, I do not think India has produced genuine match winners who can win us matches single handedly! I do not know much about the era before the 83 world cup and refrain from commenting about then! And amongst these, it has been Sachin who has played the longest, stayed the fittest and is the holder of god knows what record. C B series comes to the memory recently, before that last year's win in England, and so on...Remember the 2003 world cup folks and the India vs Pakistan game? Remember the Chennai test match against Pakistan when he nearly took India to a victory single handedly? How about the 1996 world cup and Sharjah? These are to name a few. In fact a couple of years back I remember a classic 90 odd by Sachin Tendulkar against a Pakistan bowling line up led by Akhtar and Asif at Lahore. And he led the Indians to a successful chase of a target of 282. Even this year in the test matches against Australia down under, Sachin scored centuries in Sydney and Adelaide along with a 70 and 20 at Perth. What more can a fan expect? The problem is that most of us fans expect him to score a 100 each time he bats irrespective of the fact that he might be struggling with injury or something else. Of course there is this media which plays the role of a magnifying glass. A Sachin duck would spark of comments about retirements and a Sachin century would spark off a discussion about his contributions over the last few years. It is high time that instead of examining and debating how good Sachin is, some of us should have our heads checked.