Why a Sachin Tendulkar is my signature air-cricket shot
The news that Sachin Tendulkar has been voted the greatest cricketer of all time, by a landslide in an Australian newspaper poll, would have, until recently, elicited from me a kind of wincing, squinting chafing at the cerebral lobe that controls the urge to enter into ill-advised and unwinnable contrarian debates.
Even in the same week that Tendulkar also became the first batsman to score 14,000 Test runs, while returning at the age of 38 to the top of the Test rankings, there might still have been a residual sense that there is perhaps something too corporate and earnest, too Princess Diana Memorial Book of Condolence, about the public outpourings of worship that have tended to surge across the cricketing superstructure.
Tendulkar has represented something of a personal conundrum, right from the moment he first appeared in England, gliding to an oddly frictionless first Test century as a 17-year-old at Old Trafford. Sure, I've trilled and cooed along since, taking pleasure in a flawless double ton here, a mathematical dissection of the offside field there; all the while, though, furtively studying the swooning faces for a tiny hint of doubt, or at least for a sense of sober approval, rather than full-blown Tendul-itis.
Watching Tendulkar seemed an experience of annihilating perfection, like being asked to admire an inconceivably well-engineered German supercar. This is a criticism, not of his batting style or tempo, but of its texture and temperature.
Mid-period Tendulkar had a Terminator-ish feel for me, an air of unblinking, calculus-level excellence, backed by the devouring quicksand of his unanswerable numbers. And what stats they are: Tendulkar has 46 one-day international hundreds. The current England one-day team have 16 between them.
This is a level of greatness you feel bound to stroll around, to frown at, and perhaps even reverently buy a postcard of. But still. Preferring Tendulkar to, say, the visceral, occasionally ragged genius of Brian Lara, or the Paul-Newman-riding-a-bike-around-a-haystack romance of VVS Laxman seemed to go against some basic instinct, like preferring Luke Skywalker to Han Solo, or claiming that Jesus, not the devil, always has the best tunes.
Anyway, that's all gone out of the window now. I take it all back. I confess to these guilty feelings only because something very fundamental – and your favourite Test cricketer is one of the most fundamental things there is – has changed. I think it's to do with age: his rather than mine.
Tendulkar is approaching 40 but he simply will not weaken or fray at the edges. For the dithering unbeliever that last vital sense of wild and alluring extremity has come with the sheer recklessness of his longevity, this most un-mechanical, un-robotic refusal to wither. It's the Rolling Stones principle in miniature: mildly embarrassing on stage aged 47; deeply rock'n'roll on stage aged 67.
In saying all this, it is hard not to feel now like just another supplicant, another person who believes that the Beatles are a good band, or that Coca-Cola is a refreshing drink and jeans are a comfortable type of trouser.
Tendulkar is a generous icon, however. He inspires, I have discovered, a very personal kind of reverence. For what it's worth my own revelation of Tendulkar-ness was sealed with the realisation that he has, finally, entered my range of air-cricket shots.
This is no small matter. Air-cricket is much more than just the most widely practised shadow-sport in the world. It is a hugely intimate affair.
I raised the subject of air-cricket – cricket you play in mime form, often using a bat-like object, and perhaps making a "clonk" noise as you dispatch an imaginary ball – on the Guardian's over-by-over commentary recently and was swamped with stories: the man who performed a lofted drive with his rolled degree certificate at his graduation and sent it sailing into the audience; the Russian wedding almost ruined by a display of aggressive umbrella air-batsmanship; the hospital-ward practice of playing air-cricket with a drip stand.
Air-cricket is instinctive: I have a friend who finds himself automatically playing a perfect, straight-bat air-defensive on entering any crowded room. Plus, you can only ever really play air-cricket shots that have "belonged" to cricketers you have loved. I still have a pirouetting Alec Stewart air-pull. Plus, brilliantly, I now have an air Tendulkar. It's a signature shot too, the wristy flick to leg for a strike-rotating single. Hand me an umbrella. Give me a wooden spoon. This is what you'll get. I have no higher form of praise.
There is a final point about Tendulkar. Air-cricket is, as a rule, air-Test-cricket and Tendulkar is above all a Test cricketer. It might even seem paradoxical that India's premier cricketer – the main man in a country where Twenty20 is being furiously distilled as the coming force – doesn't even play Twenty20 internationals.
He is in his small way the sentry at the gates beating back the barbarians. Along with Ricky Ponting, he is also the last great Test player of this generation. Perhaps even a case of saving the very best until the very last.
