Playing It My Way: My Autobiography

by Sachin Tendulkar

  India in England, July–August 2011

  I rejoined the team in July 2011 and was looking forward to playing against a resurgent English side in their home conditions. Under Andrew Strauss they had recently won the Ashes in Australia and were playing some excellent cricket. However, we were still the number-one Test team and it was expected to be a keenly contested series. The fact that our recently appointed coach, Duncan Fletcher, was returning to take on the England team he used to coach with such success also added spice to the series.

  For me personally the tour did not start well. My foot started to trouble me on the first day of the tour when we played Somerset in a two-day fixture at Taunton. We fielded and by lunch the pain in my toe was bad enough to make me stay off the field for treatment. When we got to London before the first Test match at Lord’s, I had a few scans done and it was revealed that the problem was again with the sesamoid bone. While there was some inflammation, luckily it wasn’t serious enough to keep me off cricket and I played in all four Tests.

  At Lord’s on 21 July 2011 we started reasonably well after winning the toss, with Zaheer picking up Andrew Strauss early on, but we were thrown off-course when Zaheer pulled a hamstring soon after lunch. In such situations you can’t do much but rue your luck. The loss of the leader of our attack undoubtedly affected us for the rest of the series.

  I remember that on the very first day I saw Zaheer, way back at the start of his career, I told him he would always have to take care of his body and bowl right through the year to keep himself fit. His physique was such that he needed to do more than others to remain in good shape. Back in 2005 I encouraged him to play county cricket, and when he came back to India after playing his first season in England, there was no doubt he was a more mature performer. Over the years he turned himself into a match-winning premier fast bowler.

  To add to our concerns, we lost Yuvraj in the second Test when he fractured his finger, then Bhajji suffered a stomach-muscle tear and Gautam Gambhir fell over and had severe concussion, which prevented him from opening the batting in the fourth Test. What’s more, we didn’t have Sehwag for the first two Tests, as he was still recovering from a shoulder operation. I don’t want to take anything away from England, who played superb cricket throughout the series, but it was a remarkable sequence of disasters and it wasn’t easy to cope with the loss of so many key players.

  One unexpected complication at Lord’s was that I found I had great difficulty picking up the ball from the new Media Centre End. England had tall fast bowlers in Chris Tremlett and Stuart Broad and I had serious trouble because the bowler’s hand was sometimes lost against the dark-coloured steps above the sightscreen. This meant I had much less time to react than usual and I had to play the ball off the pitch rather than watching the bowler’s wrist. From the Pavilion End I had no problem at all.

  After the game I spoke about the problem with the late Christopher Martin-Jenkins, who was then President of the MCC, and he promised to do something about it for the ODI at Lord’s later in the tour – but in the end I wasn’t able to play in that game. More recently, when I captained an MCC XI against Shane Warne’s Rest of the World XI at Lord’s in the Bicentenary Match in July 2014, I raised the problem again. They couldn’t increase the height of the sightscreen, but I asked them to make the staircase above it as white as possible, which they did. In the end, I didn’t have any problems because Peter Siddle was bowling and he’s not as tall as, say, Broad or Tremlett and that makes a huge difference.

  I must also confess that while I love Lord’s, I always found it difficult to cope with the slope that runs across the ground, no matter how much I tried to work out its effect. I remember facing Chris Lewis once when he was bowling from the Pavilion End. He tended to bowl inswingers and I thought I’d worked out that the slope would bring the ball in to me even more, so I played inside the line – and the ball went the other way and I was bowled!

  In 2011, on the evening of the third day of the Lord’s Test, I was laid low by a viral infection. My friend Atul Bedade, the former India international and someone who has always supported me at critical times, had come to visit me for the evening, but I realized something was wrong as soon as we got back to the hotel. I asked for a paracetamol from the physio and took it while ordering an early dinner in the room. By 8 p.m. we had finished our meal and I suggested to Atul that he should take off, but Atul didn’t want to leave me in that state and kindly decided to sleep on the sofa, so that he could make sure I was all right.

  By the middle of the night my condition had worsened and the next morning I was in no state to get up. Atul called Ashish Kaushik, our phsyio, and he advised complete rest. This was the only time in my career I was not able to join the team on the morning of a match. I slept in my hotel room till well after lunch and it was only when I checked the score on television that I called our team manager and told him I was coming to the ground. I wanted to try and play a part in the second innings, as I thought I was needed.

  Although I wasn’t able to contribute much to the team, I forced myself to field towards the end of the England innings, to make sure I would have an opportunity to bat on day five. At the end of the day’s play, I was in a really bad state. To make things worse, when I got back to the hotel I found that the air conditioning in my room had leaked and everything was wet. While I did manage to bat for a while on day five, I was nowhere near my best and found it difficult to maintain my balance in the middle.

  England ended up winning the first Test comfortably, thanks to centuries from Pietersen and Prior and five wickets for James Anderson in the second innings. In the second Test at Trent Bridge, starting on 29 July, we came back strongly and Sreesanth and Ishant Sharma helped reduced England to 124–8 at one point in their first innings, but Swann and Broad managed to bail them out, taking their score to 221. It was still not a threatening total, however, and we passed it with six wickets in hand, only to lose them all for just twenty runs, with Broad taking six wickets in the innings, and the match slipped from our grasp.

  After failing to win the second Test from a position of strength, things gradually went from bad to worse. The pain in my foot was not going away, and as a team we were outplayed yet again in the Third Test, which did not start in the best of circumstances, with riots in Birmingham creating a very tense atmosphere. The shopping centre next to our hotel was vandalized and there was talk of cancelling the tour. It was only after we were given an assurance that things were under control that the match went ahead.

  In fact, this was not the only time that off-the-field events threatened to disrupt the tour. Before the one-day series, a match against Kent in Canterbury caused us all a lot of worry. In the closing stages of the game we noticed a large number of security personnel hovering near the dressing room. We were told that a suspect package had been found on the team bus and the bomb squad were on their way. Then we were asked to go and wait on the field because the dressing room was close to the danger area. We all waited patiently until we were finally told that we could leave by the back entrance of the ground. There was yet another bomb scare at night in the shopping arcade next to our hotel and a number of the players were starting to feel anxious about our security. The following morning we were told that things were fully under control and eventually the tour continued.

  In the third Test at Edgbaston, England won the match with their first-innings total of 710, which included a career-best 294 from Alastair Cook and 104 from Eoin Morgan. I was pleased to bat well in the second innings and I don’t think anyone would deny I was unlucky to get out for 40. MS Dhoni had played a straight drive off Graeme Swann and the ball hit Swann’s hand and ricocheted onto the stumps at the non-striker’s end, running me out. With nothing going our way, we headed to The Oval for the fourth and final Test very low on morale. What was worse was that we had also lost our number-one ranking in the process, having lost three Test matches on the trot.

 
Stuck on ninety-nine

  I had scored my ninety-eighth international hundred on 27 February 2011 while playing England in our second World Cup game in Bangalore, but there was no mention of the 100th hundred in the media at that stage. Less than two weeks later, I scored the ninety-ninth against South Africa at Nagpur, but still no one brought up the 100th. The topic did come up on television when I was in the eighties against Pakistan in the World Cup semi-final, but that was no more than a passing mention. It was only after the World Cup win that the media needed a new cause to obsess over and the 100th hundred fitted the bill: it had never been achieved before, it made for good television and newsprint and it was a landmark fans could be proud of. It was a recipe for unprecedented frenzy – without always appreciating the impact it might have on me.

  I first became aware of all the fuss when I was on a family holiday in England in June 2011 before the Test series. I was asked if I had deliberately skipped the West Indies tour to ensure that the 100th hundred came at Lord’s in the first Test. I did not have a Test hundred at Lord’s (and now never will have) and this, I was informed, was my way of setting the record straight. Only, it was news to me. I would, of course, have been delighted to get the hundred at Lord’s, but hundreds simply do not happen as easily as that.

  The obsession soon turned into hysteria. Every time I went in to bat, I was supposed to get to the landmark hundred. Believe me, I wanted to get it out of the way. I was spending hours at the nets and felt good about my batting, but gradually the 100th ton was starting to play on my mind.

  At The Oval in the fourth and final Test, which started on 18 August, England scored 591 in their first innings, with 235 from Ian Bell and another century from Pietersen. We were bowled out for 300 in reply and asked to follow on. I was dismissed for 23 in our first innings, trying to play a sweep shot to Graeme Swann, and was extremely angry at getting out that way. My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that earlier I had been hit on my left shoulder by a ball from Stuart Broad and scans later revealed a tear.

  I was keen to make amends in the second innings when I went in at the fall of our second wicket with an hour of play left on day four. There was a patch of rough created by the left-arm seamer RP Singh outside the right-hander’s off stump and while batting against Graeme Swann I decided to take an off-stump guard to negate the impact of the rough. The strategy paid off and I was able to negotiate the last hour with relative ease. Resuming on 35 the next day, I focused on the thought of returning to the dressing room after batting all day to save the match.

  Amit Mishra, our leg-spin googly bowler, was batting with me and we were both conscious that the first hour on the final day was critical, with the English attack led by James Anderson bowling superbly in home conditions. Amit, the nightwatchman, was resolute in protecting his wicket and I walked up to him at the end of every over to tell him that he should bat as if it was our last wicket.

  I managed to hit a few good boundaries and began to feel I was getting a grip on proceedings. We saw off Anderson and the first hour went more or less to plan. Stuart Broad and Swann took over but we continued our resistance and got to lunch without losing a wicket. We had won the session and scored 87 runs in the process. I was on 72 and Amit had played superbly for his 57.

  On resumption, I kept telling Amit that he should focus on getting another 50 runs. Every run was getting us closer to the England total. I was on 91 when Amit was finally bowled by Swann for 84. We were just 29 adrift of the English total and the partnership had put on 144 for the fourth wicket. We had almost managed to play out the first hour after lunch and there was a good chance of saving the game if we batted well for three more hours. And that’s when I got out for 91. I was standing well outside my crease and the ball from Tim Bresnan came back a long way to hit my pads as I tried to play it to midwicket. While batting, you can usually sense the trajectory of the ball and there was little doubt in my mind that the drift would have taken the ball past the leg stump, so I was surprised to see umpire Rod Tucker raise his finger.

  A sense of helplessness descended on me. All the good work of the morning had been undone and it was going to be difficult to save the match with so many overs left in the day. The decision, replays showed, was not the best; luck, a key ingredient in cricket, had once again deserted me. When I met umpire Tucker later in the year he jokingly suggested to me that his friends were not happy with the decision and had given him a lot of grief for it. It was good of him to come and speak to me and we both decided to forget it and move on.

  The Test series was followed by a five-match one-day series and I was looking to carry forward the form I had shown at The Oval. Just then, my shoulder injury really started to bother me again. Even when I was resting during the two Twenty20 matches, it showed no signs of settling down and I was forced to have an ultrasound-guided injection in the shoulder joint. It was in Durham on the eve of the first ODI that my toe also started to play up again during training. I did everything possible to settle the pain and took a few anti-inflammatory pills at night, but they didn’t help and I woke the next morning feeling worse. I was feeling worried when we left the hotel on our way to the ground and as soon as we reached the stadium I asked Ashish Kaushik to strap my foot. The moment I stepped down from his physio table onto the hard tiles I suspected I was in trouble. When I tried getting into my spikes, I knew I couldn’t play. At the end of the second Test match I had not been able to think of missing a game. Now the pain was such that I could not think of playing a game.

  We decided to go to London for a fresh set of scans. I was given two injections in the sole of my foot and I must say they were two of the most painful injections I have had in my life. The doctors then informed me that I needed to rest my foot for five to six weeks. I finally started training again on the eve of the three-Test series against the West Indies at home in November 2011.

  As soon as I resumed practice, the clamour for the 100th hundred started again.

  West Indies in India, November–December 2011

  By November 2011, the pressure had really started to get to me. Every day I was getting a lot of text messages wishing me well for the century and asking me not to worry. They were sent with the best of intentions, but unfortunately they made it impossible for me not to think about the landmark all the time. Everywhere I went people were talking about it – in hotels, restaurants, planes and airport lounges. While it was touching to see the affection, at times it began to get quite unbearable. It was difficult to cope with all the words of sympathy and reassurance and the looks on people’s faces day after day.

  While recuperating from the toe injury under the supervision of physio Harshada Rajadhyaksha, who has helped me for over a decade, I had started to mentally prepare myself for the visit of the West Indies. It was important for the team to put the England slump behind us, especially as we had another tough tour of Australia lined up for the end of the year. Preparation was important because the West Indies attack, with Fidel Edwards, Ravi Rampaul, Kemar Roach and Darren Sammy, was not the easiest to face, a fact that became all too clear at Delhi in the first Test, which started on 6 November.

  Contrary to the general expectation that we would roll the West Indies over, we were bowled out for 209 in our first innings at Delhi and conceded a lead of 95 to the tourists. Though our bowlers did well to bowl them out for 180 in the second innings, with Ashwin taking six wickets, we were confronted with a tricky chase of 276 to win the game. I went out to bat with our score at 95–2 and was eventually out with just 30 runs needed for victory. I had scored 76 and was delighted to have helped us take a 1–0 lead in the series.

  Fans and critics, however, were not quite so pleased. As far as they were concerned, I had fallen twenty-four runs short and the headline was ‘Sachin fails again’. The hundred had turned into a fixation and people were starting to calculate my scores backwards from 100. I don’t think it had ever happened to a cricketer before and deep
down it started to get to me. As the wait continued, a section of the media started making things even more difficult. They suggested that I was only playing to achieve personal milestones. It was a strange paradox. Here I was in Delhi scoring 76 and helping India to victory, yet I was criticized for playing for selfish reasons.

  Three Indian batsmen made centuries in our only innings in the second Test at Eden Gardens in Kolkata starting on 14 November, but unfortunately I wasn’t one of them. Laxman was unbeaten on 176, while Rahul made 119 and Dhoni 144 in our total of 631. My contribution was only 38. Our bowlers then dismissed the West Indies twice to give us a win by an innings and 15 runs.

  The final Test in Mumbai started on 22 November and the West Indies dashed our hopes of a 3–0 whitewash by posting 590 in their first innings, with Darren Bravo making 166 and their first six batsmen all making fifties. At the end of the third day I was not out on 67 in our first innings and playing well. Could I really make that elusive 100th hundred on my home ground?

  On our way to the ground on the morning of the fourth day, the number of outside-broadcast vans lined up opposite the stadium was staggering and that’s when I realized this was a very different occasion from normal. Darren Sammy, the West Indies captain, took the second new ball and immediately there was some movement for both Fidel Edwards and Ravi Rampaul. I was standing outside the crease to counter the movement and told myself not to chase any balls outside off stump while the ball was swinging. I started the day well by flicking Rampaul for four in the very first over, following it up with a punch off Edwards through cover. I then produced an upper cut over slip for six against Edwards and was just seven short of the hundred.

  Just then, I looked at the scoreboard and started to feel distinctly strange. My feet were heavy and it was as if I had no strength left. I had never felt as nervous in my career, not even when I had been about to make my first Test hundred in 1990. I walked away towards square leg and took a few deep breaths. I kept telling myself to concentrate hard and not lose focus. It was a sensation I had never experienced before.