DROPS...

The 200 club

In the end, there seemed to be only one force of nature that could have stopped Sachin Tendulkar from reaching the first double century in one-day internationals: Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s inability to get the delivery away for anything less than a boundary. That was apt. Tendulkar owns many records, but they have never been just a matter of numbers. So it is that he again affirmed his special place in cricket by not allowing, in those final overs, any anxiety about the record change the drift of play. His partner was straining to give him the strike, but Tendulkar’s batting did not betray a temptation to get the strike by passing up an opportunity for a run.

This record has come late in Tendulkar’s career, a career in which India remained in the game far too often and for far too many stretches just by his very presence. For that reason, for the sense that Tendulkar now plays in a team that has it to win without him, the record is timely. Now, the team may not despair of playing a match without him; but he, unencumbered by great expectations, can still rise to them.

Tendulkar needed circumstances. We needed these circumstances for an exceptional career like Tendulkar’s to be made complete and invested with specialness. He’s been around for so long that it is easy to forget that he carried a heavy burden from the very beginning. He debuted in a series in Pakistan in 1989. In the Sialkot Test, Waqar Younis, also a debutant, bloodied 16-year-old Tendulkar’s nose. He refused to retire hurt. “It didn’t feel nice, what with blood flowing from my nose,” he would later recall. “But I couldn’t leave, for the side was not doing well.” It was a fidelity that extracted collateral damage. The team’s fortunes so often relied on him that it became a perverse conclusion that anything that made him shine had to be measured against the team’s performance. And a man given to doing well had to answer questions about not playing just for the records. On Wednesday in Gwalior, everyone was willing the game on for his record. But him. He waited out Dhoni’s uncontrollable flair and let the record come to him.