[Watch] "I ended up making sure that he didn’t get the hundred" - Dinesh Karthik and other RCB players wish Sachin Tendulkar on his 51st birthday
April 24 holds a special place in the hearts of Indian cricket fans as it is the birthdate of the one and only Sachin Tendulkar.
With Tendulkar celebrating his 51st birthday today, several Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) players took the opportunity to share their heartfelt wishes. A few of them also shared a few of their memories of and with Tendulkar.
Tendulkar remains the all-time leading run-scorer in Tests and ODIs, scoring 34,357 runs in 664 international matches. He also holds the record for most international centuries with 100 three-figure scores.
RCB wicketkeeper and Tendulkar's former India teammate Dinesh Karthik shared a good and bad memory with the legendary cricketer.
"Well, I can give you good memory, bad memory. Good memory being the fact that the first time I met him, it was on top of a flyover. We were going in a bus en route to the airport and he joined in his car and just got into the bus midway. That’s the first time I ever seen the man in my life. So that is a good memory," Karthik recalled.
"Bad memory was 97, not out. We needed four runs to win and I hit a six. So, I ended up making sure that he didn’t get the hundred, Till today, I get a lot of grief for it and rightly so. Understandable," Karthik added.
Here are Karthik and the other RCB players wishing Tendulkar on his birthday in a video shared by the franchise's Twitter handle :
The game mentioned by Dinesh Karthik took place way back in 2009 when India played Sri Lanka in an ODI in Cuttack.
Chasing 240, the Men in Blue coasted to a seven-wicket win with Tendulkar and Karthik being unbeaten at the end. While the Little Master was stranded on 96, Sri Lankan pacer Lasith Malinga was to be blamed and not Karthik for Tendulkar not completing a century.
With two needed to win, Malinga delivered a wide delivery down leg to Karthik that went for a boundary to complete the game.
"I used to always put my bag down right next to him" - Glenn Maxwell
RCB batting all-rounder Glenn Maxwell recalled often placing his bag next to Sachin Tendulkar's during his tenure with the Mumbai Indians (MI).
Incidentally, Maxwell's first IPL stint in 2013 happened to be Tendulkar's farewell season.
"So when I played at Mumbai [Indians] in 2013 with Sachin, I remember the first few weeks of the tournament, I just made sure that as soon as we walked in the change room somewhere and Sachin put his bag down, I used to always put my bag down right next to him. Just talked to him as much as I possibly could, try and drain him of any knowledge that he could potentially give me," Maxwell said.
"And he was very giving his time to me. Someone who I used to watch train a lot. We had some great chats about the game on and off the field, which was very nice of him. I wasn’t even really playing at that time, but he was very given of his time," he added.
Sachin Tendulkar played six IPL seasons from 2008 to 2013 and finished with 2,334 runs at an average of almost 35, including a century and 13 half-centuries in 78 games.
Meanwhile, RCB have struggled massively so far this season, winning only one of their eight games to be at the bottom of the points table.