adminLONDON. — Mumbai has never needed an excuse to unfurl the bunting for its favourite son. But in the last few days India’s greatest city has moved into overdrive.
Sachin Tendulkar is about to play his 200th Test cricket today. And, as befits a cricketer who likes to deal in nice round numbers, it will also be his last. The mood is poised somewhere between a funeral and a celebration. Most observers are content simply to shower praise on one of the most enduring phenomena in all sport, possibly because they know that the alternative — life without Tendulkar — is just too bleak to contemplate.
When the second Test between India and West Indies begins at Mumbai’s Wankhede stadium at 6am today, Tendulkar will embark on the last leg of a journey that began at the age of 16 in a Test match at Karachi.
That was in 1989, six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As if in sympathy, Tendulkar has spent much of the 24 years since constructing his own impenetrable edifice, leaving bowlers to bang their heads against something akin to bricks and mortar. Most international cricketers would be thrilled with even 10 years at the highest level; Tendulkar’s career has spanned four decades. And in that time he has moulded the psyche of the second-most populous nation on earth. Even by Indian standards, the excitement here is palpable.
Giant advertising billboards taken out by Star Sports, who are broadcasting a series that was shoehorned into the schedule as part of the careful stage-management of Tendulkar’s retirement, are proclaiming a simple tag-line: “Believe”. No one seems especially minded to ask what it is we are supposed to believe, although the most plausible explanation lies in the nickname given to him by younger members of the Indian team: “Bhagwan” is the Hindi word for God — and right now Mumbai feels like a city of 20 million believers. Tendulkar’s home town is not alone. When the first Test took place at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens last week, Bengali spectators held up signs proclaiming “Godbye”, happy in the knowledge that this was one spelling error that would not need correcting.
Even Tendulkar’s mother, Rajni, will break the habit of a lifetime this week and turn up to watch her son play; a special wheelchair ramp will facilitate her entry into the stadium, where security staff will presumably be on red alert to spare her an ear-bashing from quote- hungry journalists. — Mailonline.
Online Reporter