1989 was about Sachin's courage, not genius

 Manjrekar and player-BCCI spat, not Sachin, drove copy, senior journalist Gautam Bhattacharya who covered that series tells Meenakshi Rao

Strange it may sound, but the inaugural 1989 series of Sachin Tendulkar was, back then, hardly known for the little master’s presence. It was more the romance around rising star Sanjay Manjrekar than the impending genius of Tendulkar which drove dinner discussions among journalists, he insists. Sunil Gavaskar had even sung a salutary Calypso song for Manjrekar in an informal Sunday baithak with journalists which were then a means of off-the-record interaction between players and covering scribes, says Gautam Bhattacharya, one of the six Indian journalists who covered that series.

Rest of the time, reportage was more focussed on the ugly ongoing spat between then BCCI president VN Dutt and the players. Just prior to the series, a group of players, including Kapil Dev, had opted to go on a US tour despite a Board rider against it. So when the Pakistan tour was announced, the BCCI was even contemplating a ban on these players and was in the midst of setting up a Team B led by Sandeep Patil.

Eventually, Krishnamachari Srikkanth went as captain though there was still friction, this time over the logo money-sharing issue. Karachi, where Sachin debuted along with Waqar Younis, was Kapil Dev’s 100th Test match and it was not sure till the day of the match that Tendulkar would make it into the playing 11. It was only after Raman Lamba withdrew from the squad at the 11th hour that Sachin came into the picture.

A senior sports journalist, in his report, suggested that Lamba may have gotten cold feet about facing the pace battery of Pakistan. He rang up the journalist and blasted him for such an accusation. But the ultimate gainer was Tendulkar.

Bhattacharya recalls that it was only after the Test series, when the 16-year-old Tendulkar blasted Abdul Qadir for four sixes at the Peshawar ODI that he started getting noticed. “In any case, the 1989 tour was more about his courage to stand up to pace bowlers (at Sialkot, he was hit by a Younis bouncer, started bleeding but stood up instantly to resume play) than about his genius,” he tells you.

In fact, so far was the Karachi Press box from the middle that in the absence of live TV, one had to depend on binoculars to see which player was walking in.

It so happened that after a batsman got out, everyone thought the new man in was the bachcha (Tendulkar). He played two or three bad shots and the unanimous opinion was that it was a huge mistake to have tested the kid so soon. Later, someone in the Press box realised it was not Tendulkar but Manoj Prabhakar who was the new man in and he had been sent in to delay Sachin’s arrival by a concerned Indian management,” he remembers.

Whatever chirp there was around an unassuming Tendulkar during that series was about the young one’s commitment to his craft. Stories had just about started emanating about this 16-year-old playing all the time in the dressing room putting his bat to a tennis ball. “But the romance of the Tendulkar name was far from happening back then,” Bhattacharya recalls.

But Peshawar changed the way one thought not just about Sachin but about India too. Abdul Qadir who had been ripped apart by a callow youth called Tendulkar was the first to pour adulation. “Yeh bachcha Viv Richards banane wala hai,” he told his teammates and most of them agreed.

At the end of the tour, Srikkanth had also turned reverential. “Sachin tu ek din India ka captain aur ek bahut bada player banega. Us din mujh becharey ko yaad kar lena,” he told a bemused Tendulkar who was still calling every person in the dressing room and the support staff ‘sir’ and ‘uncle’. 

Source: The Pioneer, November 17, 2013