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Hyderabad: When Sachin Tendulkar batted the way he did in Hyderabad last evening, one imagines that Mohd. Azharuddin - if he wasn't in the stadium but in front of his LCD TV - would be calling out to wife Sangeeta in typical Hyderabadi, "Arre begum suniye, iniko-ich dekhiye zara. He reminds me of my time."
Tendulkar does that to people. He did it famously to Don Bradman; on Thursday, he did it again, this time after a huge passage of time. Suddenly, calling missing folk to the TV screens became the calling of a nation. "Just like Sachin of old, no?" became a common refrain on Thursday night, even if it is still slightly unbelievable to attach "old" to a man who remains our beefed-up version of Peter Pan.
Recall is perhaps the unique proposition in sport, and arguably it's the biggest challenge too. More so in a sport like cricket where you're up against some team every other day. Someone recently quipped how T20s were the new One-dayers, One-dayers the new Tests and Tests, the old Tests. It wasn't to do so much with changing formats as it was with accommodating changing perceptions. If we, as spectators (sorry, we aren't consumers yet) are so assailed by the constant change, imagine its toll on someone who's weathered that change for 20 years.
So, thank god for the 175 in Hyderabad. We were under threat of forgetting what a true blue, all-dominant Sachin special looked like, and he gave us a repeat telecast for posterity. Despite the recall, it wasn't Chennai 1999 all over again. Perhaps caught up in the immediacy of the occasion on Thursday, the man himself admitted being disappointed by the narrow margin of the loss, but the fact stays that it ceased to matter. The Indian tail became a footnote. Harbhajan, Jadeja, Nehra, Munaf and Praveen Kumar were handed the once age-old status in Indian cricket - that of being incidental to anything that matters in the end. Still, no fault of the great big man.
What is it about genius that it drives all? That even the illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, working as the colony cook, immediately finds allegiance and even forges some strange form of identity with one batting innings? Cricket finally came home on Thursday night, riding on pint-sized Sachin Tendulkar's broad shoulders.
Try recalling the last time a key Indian defeat actually rendered the subsequent verdict of a series totally redundant, reducing the final scoreline to a mere number and precious little else. Among all the milestones that he scaled on Thursday, perhaps the most important point that Tendulkar inadvertently drove home was this. It must have horrified the numbers men of the sport: to witness the racking up of a mighty number, to see mockery being made of an insurmountable target and yet, the figures ironically becoming passing fact.
Only born-again geniuses could carry out such executions with such impassive glee. In Hyderabad on Thursday, Sachin Tendulkar did. Like the colony cook and Azharbhai, how we all watched.
