5 worst defeats for Sachin Tendulkar in ODIs
"You get him out and half the battle is won", World Cup winner Arjuna Ranatunga had once famously said about Sachin Tendulkar. Such was the impact of his wicket in the one-day format of the game.
An ODI career that stretched across 3 decades, Tendulkar has seen it all, from single-handedly demolishing the opposition to winning the World Cup to falling short of a hundred to falling short of a half-century of hundreds in the ODI format.
Tendulkar has a flabbergasting 18,426 runs to his name in the ODI version of cricket with 49 centuries but the demi-god of cricket has had to deal with several dejections in his ODI career, sometimes in spite of him performing well and sometimes because of a collective failure.
Now let us chronologically look at 5 instances of defeat which can be termed worst in Tendulkar's massive career:
#5 India vs Sri Lanka, Kolkata, Semi-final 1996 World Cup
The stage was perfectly set for a plausible triumph in a World Cup in the home soil and this was the second time that the then-22-year-old Tendulkar was playing a World Cup.
Sri Lanka batted first and scampered to 251. Chasing a modest total of 252 in front of a packed Eden Gardens crowd, to sail into the Finals would be an Indian cricketer's dream and Tendulkar was living that dream.
He was batting elegantly and made 65 with 9 fours before he attempted to take a single off a leg-bye without knowing the position of the ball on the field and Romesh Kaluwitharana cleverly dislodged the bails.
From then, the Indians lost the plot and from 98/1 they fell to 120/8 in no time and in addition to this, the crowd's misbehavior led to the match being awarded to Sri Lanka.
This is one of Tendulkar's worst defeats in his career as the chance to win the World Cup at home was done and dusted.