Playing It My Way: My Autobiography (28 page)

Virender Sehwag, on his debut, also played aggressively and, had we batted a little better in the second innings, we could have saved the game. Instead, we lost by nine wickets, with Shaun Pollock taking 6–56. My partnership with Sehwag was our high point and I remember asking him if he was nervous when he walked out to bat for the first time in a Test. He admitted that he was a little and I immediately told him that was normal. In fact, it was good to be a little nervous and everyone who played Test cricket experienced similar nerves. He just needed to play his natural game and the nervousness would disappear once he’d spent a little time out in the middle. He did so and scored a fantastic hundred on debut.

We went to Port Elizabeth for the second Test. Sara and Arjun were both with me and on one evening before the match I asked the hotel staff to recommend a restaurant where we could go out for a good family meal. Eating together was the only way I could spend quality time with my children and I looked forward to these meals at the end of long, hard work days. The hotel staff told me about a diner that also had a fairly big play area where the children could enjoy themselves and we ended up going to the same restaurant three days in a row. It was from this restaurant that I picked up the idea of the play area that I put in my own restaurant when I opened Tendulkar’s in Mumbai in 2004.

Food on tour was always an important consideration for the team and to get the kind of food we liked in places such as Bulawayo in Zimbabwe and some South African cities could sometimes be a real problem.

I remember one occasion in Bulawayo when all the players were yearning for home food. We were tired of eating the same breakfast and lunch in the hotel, and the restaurants were not the best. Spotting an Indian family that had come to see us play, Sameer Dighe boldly walked up to them and said that the team was desperate to eat some good Indian food – could they help?

Jhanak bhai, the man in question, was a Gujarati settled in Zimbabwe and he ended up inviting the team to his home, where we feasted on a home-cooked meal of Gujarati-style dal, rice and ghee. We all had three spoons of ghee and pigged out on the food in front of us. It soon became a regular thing and Jhanak bhai and his family fed us many times. Others who have been kind enough to provide us with good home-cooked food in Zimbabwe and South Africa are Raj and Chester Naik and Jayesh Desai. They have selflessly helped us whenever we have toured their parts of the world and have made a major contribution to our well-being. Raj and Chester Naik also took us to play golf and we had some wonderful dinners together. Invariably Ravi Shastri would join us for these dinners because they were his friends first. I became good friends with many of them and must say I will always remember the warmth and affection I received from them and their families.

We managed a better batting performance in the Port Elizabeth Test, which started on 16 November 2001. Rahul Dravid and Deep Dasgupta, our wicketkeeper, played resolutely on the last day, and we saved the match comfortably in the end. However, what hit the headlines from that match were the allegations made against me by the match referee Mike Denness, who also charged five other Indian players.

The incident occurred on the third day, when I bowled a four-over spell, taking the wicket of Herschelle Gibbs. I was bowling seam-up and was getting the ball to swing both ways. During this spell I used my thumb to clean off the grass that was stuck on the seam.

Soon after the end of the day’s play we were informed that the match referee had called six Indian players for a hearing and that I had been accused of ball tampering. I was shocked, because I had always played cricket with integrity and honesty and would never do such a thing.

When I met the match referee I informed him that I was merely trying to clean the seam of the ball. My mistake, which I have no hesitation in owning up to, was that I should have informed the on-field umpires under Law 42.3 when I was cleaning the seam, but I’m afraid it did not enter my mind in the intensity of the moment. I asked Mike Denness to consult the on-field umpires, because they had checked the ball every two or three overs and were in the best position to tell if the ball had been tampered with. Denness said that there was no need to consult the umpires, presumably because I had admitted altering the ball by cleaning the seam.

I found this strange, because there was no way Denness could gauge what was going on in the middle when he was sitting eighty yards away from the pitch. None of the umpires had lodged a formal complaint against me and it was humiliating to be labelled a cheat. I wasn’t prepared to let it pass. I informed Mike Denness that I would complain about the allegation to the BCCI and would not keep quiet about it.

Apart from charging me with ball tampering, Mike Denness handed captain Sourav Ganguly a one-match suspended ban for failing to control the players and banned Virender Sehwag for one match on a charge of over-appealing. Deep Dasgupta, Harbhajan Singh and Shiv Sunder Das, the opening batsman, were all handed a one-Test suspended ban and fined 75 per cent of their match fee for the same offence. The team considered these punishments harsh, especially when none of the South Africans had been pulled up despite, we felt, appealing just as aggressively. It is a hard game and sometimes things get heated in the middle. But we didn’t think we deserved the punishments we had been handed.

We informed the BCCI that the allegations were unsubstantiated and unfair. We were delighted when the BCCI, led by Jagmohan Dalmiya, stood steadfastly behind us and informed the ICC that the team had lost faith in the match referee. We also received support in the media; the Indian journalistic fraternity, at home and on tour, was united behind the team. We were prepared to abandon the tour if need be, but we weren’t ready to be labelled cheats. It was about honour and there was no way we would allow a match referee to cast aspersions on our credibility.

Things had come to such a pass at one point that we weren’t sure if the tour would actually carry on. There were conflicting reports everywhere and the atmosphere was one of mistrust and confusion. The situation came to a head twenty-four hours before the start of the third Test match, when it was finally decided by the Indian and South African boards, rather than by the ICC, that Mike Denness should not officiate in the match. Denis Lindsay, the former South African wicketkeeper, was the replacement, and the match went ahead, but it was labelled an unofficial Test match by the ICC.

Not everything was right about it after all the acrimony, which I must say was largely unnecessary. Mike Denness’s decisions had led to a crisis that had ended up dividing the cricket world down the middle. It was an avoidable incident and one that left everyone bitter in the end.

1st Test. Bloemfontein. 3–6 November 2001

India 379 (
SR Tendulkar 155
, V Sehwag 105; S Pollock 4–91, M Hayward 3–70) and 237 (SS Das 62, V Sehwag 31,
SR Tendulkar 15
; SM Pollock 6–56)

South Africa 563 (L Klusener 108, HH Gibbs 107, G Kirsten 73, J Kallis 68, ND McKenzie 68; J Srinath 5–140, A Kumble 3–132) and 54–1

South Africa won by 9 wickets

2nd Test. Port Elizabeth. 16–20 November 2001

South Africa 362 (HH Gibbs 196, MV Boucher 68*; J Srinath 6–76,
SR Tendulkar 1–22
) and 233–5 dec (JH Kallis 89*, SM Pollock 55*; J Srinath 2–28, H Singh 2–79)

India 201 (VVS Laxman 89, SC Ganguly 42,
SR Tendulkar 1
; SM Pollock 5–40) and 206–3 (R Dravid 87, D Dasgupta 63,
SR Tendulkar 22*
; M Hayward 2–58)

Match drawn

South Africa won the series 1–0

Within a week of returning from South Africa we faced Nasser Hussain’s Englishmen at home in December 2001. Nasser, nowadays a respected commentator, played hard and came up with some ultra-defensive tactics against me. It was in this series that Nasser instructed his left-arm spinner Ashley Giles to bowl from over the wicket and consistently pitch the ball way outside my leg stump. Nasser and Giles were counting on the fact that I would have limited scoring options off balls bowled there and were hoping to frustrate me and induce me to play a false shot. They had essentially given up any attempt to get me out in favour of trying to get under my skin.

While Giles did manage to have me stumped, for the first time in my Test career, in the third Test in Bangalore, overall these tactics had little impact on the result of the series. I scored a lot of runs in all three Test matches and was declared Player of the Series.

I was reminded of this series when Nasser, who is a good friend, met me a couple of years later in South Africa during the 2003 World Cup. We were in the washroom during the inaugural function and Nasser jokingly started the conversation, saying, ‘So I am in the washroom with the great Mr Tendulkar.’ It was a minute-long conversation and we were both enjoying ourselves. It was friendly banter between two people who have great regard for each other. From memory, the conversation went something like this:

N
ASSER
: You have to agree that I was successful in stopping you and getting you frustrated during the 2001 England tour of India when I got Ashley Giles to bowl to you from over the wicket.

S
ACHIN
: You did indeed, but despite his efforts, my batting average for the series was 76, with scores of 88, 103 and 90 in the three Test matches, and I was in fact nominated Player of the Series. I would love to have that average right through my career.

We won the series 1–0, a result that gave us considerable confidence as we looked forward to the return tour of England the following summer. It looked likely to be an enthralling series.

It was in the early stages of the 2002 tour of England that I first gave a masterclass. It was at the Rose Bowl, where we were playing a warm-up game against Hampshire, and it was organized by Mark Nicholas for Channel 4 television. I enjoyed talking to a group of youngsters about the basics of batting, including how to grip the bat.

People have often commented on my own grip, which is very low down on the handle. It all goes back to when I started playing cricket when I was eleven with my brother Ajit, who is ten years older. As I didn’t have a bat of my own, I had to use Ajit’s full-size bat and the only way I could cope with the weight at that age was to hold the bat right at the bottom of the handle. Some coaches suggested changing my grip, and I did experiment, but it never felt right. I had got used to feeling the end of the handle pressing against the inside of my forearm and if I gripped the bat further up I didn’t have that, and batting just didn’t feel natural.

That’s not to say that my technique didn’t change at all, though. Throughout my career, I was always looking to improve and constantly tried new things to cope with different situations. My backlift changed significantly over the years, for example. I used a pretty heavy bat and I was sometimes encouraged to move to a lighter one. Again, I did try but I never felt comfortable, as my whole bat swing depended on that weight. When I was hitting a drive, I needed the weight to generate the power. It was all to do with the timing. To me the bat should be an extension of your arm, and if you’ve reached the stage where it’s become an extension of your arm, why do you need to change?

What mattered to me most when I was batting was feeling comfortable. As long as I felt comfortable, it didn’t matter where I was playing or who I was playing against. If you make technical adjustments, such as moving to a lighter bat, to cope with different conditions, there’s a risk of making yourself feel uncomfortable and of thinking too much about your technique. I’ve always felt that I’ve batted best when my mind has been at the bowler’s end of the pitch, not at my end. In fact, for both batsmen and bowlers, I’ve always believed that cricket is played best when your mind is at the opposite end and that problems occur when your mind is stuck at your own end.

For example, if a bowler is thinking too much about bowling no-balls, he’s not going to be able to bowl what he wants to bowl. Instead, his mind should be at the batsman’s end, focusing on where he’s going to pitch the ball, which way he’s going to swing it and so on. As a batsman, if I’m not consciously worrying about my footwork or my backlift or my wrist-work, then I know that I’m in the right space, because my mind needs to be at the opposite end, figuring out what the bowler is trying to do. There’s no time to think about both ends at the same time. So in general it always seemed to me that if I was comfortable with my gear, it would allow my mind to be at the opposite end and I had a better chance of playing well.

I have always enjoyed playing in England, but on the 2002 tour it took the team a little time to adjust to the conditions. The first of the four Tests, at Lord’s, started on 25 July 2002 and England won pretty convincingly, with Hussain making his highest score for five years and Michael Vaughan also contributing a century. For India, the high point was my friend Ajit Agarkar’s second-innings hundred, and I was delighted to see his name go up on the famous honours board in the dressing room.

We knew we needed to be more competitive in the next Test at Trent Bridge ten days later if we were to stay alive in the four-match series. Once again England posted a huge score, with Vaughan again in good form, and we were faced with batting out the last day to survive. The pitch was assisting the bowlers and quite a few balls were taking off from a good length, while some were keeping low. In difficult circumstances, Rahul and I put together an important partnership. There were occasions when we were beaten by balls which had either taken off or kept low and all we did was smile. We chatted at the end of every over but never once talked about the deliveries we had missed. It was natural that the ball would occasionally beat us on a fifth-day wicket offering uneven bounce; we enjoyed the challenge.