Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar, begins with the scene no cricket fan will ever forget
Sachin Tendulkar
Mumbai: On the morning of November 14, 2013, Dilip D’Souza looked outside his Mumbai home, at the big black gate across the street. A huge press contingent was waiting, but waiting for what, he wondered.
Not that it was unusual, seeing people waiting outside that house for hours, for days, to catch a glimpse of the man inside Sachin Tendulkar. But that day, D’Souza knew, Sachin would be staying at a hotel, with his teammates.
Because that day he was going to play his last Test at the Wankhede Stadium. What D’Souza didn’t know was that the three-day Test match, with all its details every ball, every emotion in the stadium was already being written in his head.
Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar, begins with the scene no cricket fan will ever forget. Something like 35,000 pair of eyes, and many, many more via TV, were focused on a particular spot in the pavilion of the Wankhede Stadium, at the head of a flight of stairs… They were all waiting... waiting for Sachin Tendulkar to arrive and, for one last time, watch him play.
His last Test match turned into an all-consuming outpouring of emotion and affection and nostalgia for the man, no matter what happened in the game itself.
For Sachin Tendulkar, a farewell to the game could not have happened any other way. It was not just his last game, it was culmination of a life played out near the crease, of a life measured by the balls bowled and caught, and of runs scored all of which have passed into history and embellish the story of the legend.
It was three years ago that Sachin moved into his neighbourhood. But D’Souza, a writer and journalist, never waited with the fans outside his gate. He didn’t admire Sachin’s batting, like he did Brian Lara’s or Rahul Dravid’s.
But that day, sitting at the Wankhede Stadium, covering that last match and its mood, it struck D’Souza that there was a book in there. The memory of another book he had read a long time ago popped up in his head.
Forty-Eight Minutes: A Night in the Life of the NBA, by Bob Ryan and Terry Pluto, was a play-by-play account of a basketball game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics. The thought came and went, for at the moment D’Souza had a task at hand he had to take notes about the match, register and decipher the mood.
After the task at hand was accomplished, he pitched the idea to Random House and they liked it. So D’Souza sat down with his notes, his memories of everyday scenes outside Sachin Tendulkar’s house, facts and figures, and began writing Final Test.
The book is not a ball-by-ball account, neither is it a tribute to Sachin. It is a kind of rumination on cricket and everything around it: The commercialisation of cricket, the IPL, the power of the BCCI, the changing styles of batting, and the way the country itself is changing.
D’Souza never tried to meet Sachin to discuss his last match, but he writes of the one time he waited outside the house with his wife to tell the Tendulkars about the disturbing noise from the construction work at night, in preparation of their arrival.
“We sat there on the street for two hours, working and waiting, the driver in his safari suit hovering about and chatting from time to time. Eventually Mrs and Mr Tendulkar appeared. Calm and gracious, they told the foreman these night-time disturbances must not happen again (it didn’t).”
D’Souza says, “I didn’t include any quotes from Sachin, but I think, maybe, he knows about the book. Because the day the book proof was delivered at my home, I saw his name in the courier’s list, above mine I knew Random House had sent him a copy, too.”
D’Souza says he wanted to give a fan’s eye view of the game of cricket. His account begins long before the day of the match, from the time he got the assignment to cover it for a magazine. “I had a clear outline of the day-by-day account of the game, and stuck to that. There’s only a bit of mathematics that I added, and that is my favorite part.”
Before every chapter, and in between his narrative, D’Souza quotes sports figures. He also slips into history to narrate the story of another match, of another legendary cricketer. “As I talk to you, I am looking at my little shelf of books on tennis, cricket and basketball, I am a big fan of sports.”
Of all the sports he loves, D’Souza chose to play tennis. And in the book he often compares cricket with tennis. “At one place I have compared fast bowling in cricket to serving in tennis. I wonder if I’m the first to do that.”
And then there are personal anecdotes, about the time a friend had let them down by not putting a full toss away for six, or the time he made friends with Tendulkar’s driver. There are also his views on the man and the game.
A marked disapproval of the way Sachin Tendulkar’s 200th Test was organised “only for Sachin” against a poor team like West Indies is apparent. “I think he should have said that if he was good enough to be selected for two more Tests, he would play till his 200th. Else he would retire. Would his fans love him any less if he had only played 198 tests?”
D’Souza says he has no doubt that Sachin was a great batsman. It’s just that he did not really enjoy watching the man bat: “Like you find some women attractive, and some, not.” But he has not let that spoil his account of the hardcore fans at the Wankhede Stadium, who hooted and howled every time Sachin made a move in the ground.
And notes that they wished for a better game from the Windies, if only to see “their god” play his last innings the way legends are meant to.
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