Read an extract from Indian Summers by Gideon Haigh.
Read a section of Indian Summers by Gideon Haigh the master cricket writer on the battle between two cricket superpowers: Australia and India.
Sachin Tendulkar v Ricky Ponting
TEST OF TIME (2010)
It’s one of those challenges whose resolution will be both satisfying and sad. For nigh on a decade, the statistics of Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar have stood like pillars, suspending aloft a great arch of batsmanship. When their day is done, one or other will have achieved the monumental proportions of the record for Test run-scoring: a record that, given the dwindling incidence of Test matches, may last for all time.
The respective records are already extraordinary. Tendulkar has 13,447 runs at 55.56 from 166 Tests plus 17,598 runs at 45.12 from 442 one-day internationals, including a total of ninety-three hundreds. It’s an eloquent attestation of the industrialisation of the global game. Tendulkar has played twenty years, as long as Bradman, and scored four times as many runs, despite several injury-related absences. Could even Bradman have maintained such intensity of productivity? Given the different values of his period, would he even have wanted to?
Ponting, meanwhile, has 11,859 runs at 55.67 from 142 Tests, plus 12,731 runs at 43.30 from 340 one-day internationals, having given Tendulkar a six-year head start, and being eighteen months his junior: Australia’s captain turned thirty-five in December, India’s champion turns thirty-seven in April. Ponting’s 209 against Pakistan at Bellerive in January represented his thirty-ninth three-figure score in Tests, while his 106 against the West Indies at the Gabba a month later was his twenty-ninth three-figure score in limited-overs internationals. It bespeaks an appetite, for runs and for cricket, almost unappeasable.
There is an epic grandeur to the achievements of both men, not least because they have chosen to ennoble the game’s oldest international form. In a country that bequeathed pyjama cricket to the world, Ponting has persevered with the cricket equivalent of dressing for dinner. In a country gone crazy for the limerick of T20, Tendulkar has steadily written the Mahabharata of batting. In a world of braggarts, both are resolutely humble. In an era when bigger is always assumed better, both are small men punching way above their relative weight and heights. And in a game bent now at every opportunity on selling itself to the highest bidder, both Ponting and Tendulkar have put national responsibilities beyond price. They feel the honour of representing their countries; you, the fan, feel the honour of being represented by them.
Scrutinising their respective records is a little like listening for bum notes in Mozart. Tendulkar’s batting may have been slightly inhibited by captaincy: he averaged 51 as leader, 56 otherwise. Ponting averages 55 as leader, having averaged 55 in the ranks.
Tendulkar, on the other hand, averages 55 at home and away. Wherever he is playing somehow becomes Sachinland, a secure principality of batting excellence. The borders of Rickyworld are a little more porous. He averages 60 at home, 50 away, and, strangely, only 44 in England – an oversight that may account for his eagerness to return there for the Ashes of 2013.
Both men have reached that stage where their opponent is time, as much as any particular country or bowler. Whether it’s Tendulkar or Ponting who ends with batting’s blue riband depends, as did the duel for the wicket-taking record between Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan, on who is the last man standing. Time has taken a toll on the physiques of both, like the elements leaving their mark on a statue. No elbow in history has been as discussed as Tendulkar’s; Ponting’s back and right wrist are feeling his age.
In recognition of the march of time, both are shunning distractions, as they have sometimes abjured particular strokes. Like silent film stars loath to embrace talkies, they had little impact on the game’s newest and most lucrative form. Ponting has quit the IPL and retired from international T20. Tendulkar has been a low-key presence in the Indian Premier League, and played precisely one T20 international, against South Africa in December 2006. Tendulkar approaches Test innings now with such system as to seemingly negate all variables. ‘Watching Sachin Tendulkar bat these days is almost like watching a re-run of one’s favourite TV show,’ wrote Cricinfo’s Sriram Veera after studying Tendulkar at work in Chittagong in January, somehow capturing not just Tendulkar’s surety of touch, but also the contribution of television to the spread of his legend in this vast, sprawling, populous nation.
Over their futures, the chief influence is probably that of their respective national administrations. Cricket Australia, which has argued at the ICC for a World Test Championship, still takes five-day cricket seriously. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, the largest obstacle to a World Test Championship, eyes five-day fixtures as mistrustfully as a property developer discovering a church occupying a city block: yes, it’s pretty and all that, but wouldn’t an office building or a car park make more sense? Were the BCCI to acquire the Taj Mahal, it would not be long before a television mast had been thrust through the dome.
CA will ensure that Ponting has a steady supply of Test matches, and thus a solid chance of overhauling whatever benchmark Tendulkar sets. He will finish this year involved in another five-Test series; Tendulkar has played only three such in his entire career, none at home, and his Test engagements are becoming so few that he can hardly afford to fail.
Say it soft, in fact, but Tendulkar the batsman is verging on anachronism. To the most historically and commercially significant game of his era, the final of the World T20 in Johannesburg, which ignited India’s passion for the game’s newest and richest form, he was an onlooker. For one of the crowning triumphs of his career, his fording of the 12,000 Test-run barrier in Mohali in September 2008, there were virtually no onlookers at all.
So for all the splendour of this batting rivalry, cricket is in the process of debasing it. As observed at the outset, the likelihood is that even if Test cricket survives, nobody will play enough in future to parallel the feats of either man. It is like two mountaineers racing one another to the summit of Everest only to find that there is more kudos in climbing ladders – yet further evidence, if it were needed, of how the fast buck has travestied cricket.
Extracted from Indian Summers by Gideon Haigh.
Indian Summers
by Gideon Haigh
Australia versus India - Cricket's Battle of the Titans
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