Greatest players: Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Tendulkar

This is the first piece of a new thing I will be doing on this blog called ‘Greatest players’. Every few weeks I will pick a great player from the beautiful game and treat you to a little history of the player, their averages, their finest moments and my personal opinion of them. So sit back, relax and enjoy this week’s player.

SACHIN TENDULKAR

Where to even begin with Sachin. Sachin was born on the 24th April, 1973, and is arguably one of the greatest batsman ever. He began playing at an early age and at the age of just 15, he made his debut for Mumbai against Gujarat in which he scored 100 not out, which made him the youngest Indian to score a century on their first-class debut.

He made his Test debut in 1989 against Pakistan, and during his Test career he has racked up an astonishing 198 matches in which he scored 15,837 runs with a batting average of 53.86 with a top score of 248*.

Sachin also occasionally tried a bit of bowling and bowled 4,198 balls during Test matches and managed to take 45 wickets.

His ODI career is also an outstanding one. He played 463 matches where he scored 18,426 runs with an average of 44.83 and a famous top score of 200*. He also took 154 wickets during ODI games with a bowling average of 44.32.

Sachin or ‘Little Master’ as he is also known has produced many fine innings over the years but one of the finest surely has to be when he scored 241* against Australia in 2004. It was an unbelievable knock and a return to form for him as he had scored two ducks in three of the  previous games .

Sachin Tendulkar is a wonderful little player who produced magic on countless occasions for the Indian cricket team. He pretty much is cricket in India. If you could use two words to describe Indian cricket you would most likely say Sachin Tendulkar.

For the Indian cricket fans, cricket is like a religion and Sachin is like their God. They practically worship him. For me I may not have seen his early days but from what I saw I can only agree with the praise he gets. I was lucky enough to witness him bat at Hove a few years ago against Sussex, where India were playing a warm up match. He produced some exquisite drives and sadly was out quite quickly but I still thoroughly enjoyed what I saw and that was one of the only time I’ve been upset when Sussex have taken a wicket.

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think of Sachin Tendulkar.