Ever since the Golden Age of cricket, the masses have sought their heroes. Idolised and sanctified, the early recipients became the true forebears of the professional era as we now know it. Dr. W.G Grace is perhaps the famous of all cricketers but things were different then. For a start, the British Empire was then at it's zenith and for the millions who worked down the mines and in unimaginably difficult working conditions, the cricketing exploits of the Gloucestershire physician provided a welcome distraction from their day to day hardships.
That was in late Victorian England whereas Tendulkar is revered almost exclusively in his native India. For all the records he has broken along the way, the aspects of his career which deserve special praise are his longevtiy and the way in which he has coped with a public expectation which we can barely guess at. There is no doubt he has been a great batsman but arguments regarding the greatest are always very difficult. I don't consider him to be the greatest for the simple reason that he has never had to make his runs on uncovered pitches. He may well have done so but we will never know. It is also easy to forget that his career has coincided with a new era in Indian cricket. He has enjoyed the company of some truly wonderful players during his 24 years at the crease. I will always look back on the side which featured Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid and Sehwag. As a former bowler, the mere mention of their names makes your heart sink. At the beginning of his career, Tendulkar shared the field with the man who was India's darling for a long time. Kapil Dev had vied with Botham, Imran, Hadlee and Rice as the world's finest all-rounder during the 1980s. He was a very under-rated bowler and an explosive batsman. With Gavaskar, he carried the hopes of the nation for a long time.
They played their cricket when the West Indies ruled the cricket world. Had Tendulkar been playing his last innings against Holding, Garner, Marshall and Roberts in their pomp, I feel 74 might have flattered him. That said, you can only bat against what is front of you and his performance has been admirable. We grew up with our own idol. He was the man for whom the bars emptied at Test Matches when news spread that he was going out to bat. National productivity stalled for the tenure of his innings. Ian Botham was the one name we wanted to see on the team sheet because we knew that as long he was playing, anything was possible. The number of biographies of Botham are testament to the massive interest in him. Even in Botham's day, they played nowhere near the amount of cricket they do today and I very much doubt whether his weary body would have lasted more than his 102 test matches let alone 200. He had to perform with bat and ball and that takes it's toll on any man. Where Botham and controversy never strayed too far apart, Tendulkar has had an unblemished career with only his captaincy skills shown to be lacking.
It is scarcely possible to imagine what cricket means in India. I've never been there but have many friends from India and they leave me in no doubt about the place of cricket in Indian society. If we think the football Premier League is big over here, we don't know the half of it. With such fanaticism comes massive expectation and Tendulkar has weathered that particular storm admirably.
When I consider the greatest batsmen from history, they are mainly men of average to short height with a few notable exceptions. Cerrtainly, batsmen like Graeme Pollock, Gary Sobers, Peter May and Frank Woolley were all very tall. These players aside though, I think of Jack Hobbs, Don Bradman, Wally Hammond, Viv Richards, Dennis Compton, Neil Harvey, Colin Cowdrey, Brian Lara and Everton Weekes. These were all players who would fill a ground by the reputation and technique of their batting. Tendulkar would certainly fit that bill and didn't appear to have a weakness in his game. Some would argue that batting on the slow, dry wickets of the Indian sub-continent is a different proposition to the faster wickets of the Caribbean and Australia.
With the passing of Tendulkar, India will be watching out for it's next idol and in a way, one pities the unlucky recipient of such intrusive attention. Whoever that person is will need to have great powers of concentration and a Stackhanovite attitude to batting. They will accrue great riches at the expense of their private life. The baton is being held out but who wants it?
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