Column

Sachin Tendulkar believes that the team currently touring New Zealand is the best batting side he has played in where ODIs are concerned. I would venture a tad further and say — with due apologies to Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar and Sourav Ganguly — that this is perhaps the best limited overs side India has ever had.

Kapil led India to victory in the 1983 World Cup, Gavaskar to the World Championship of Cricket in 1985, and Ganguly’s side reached the final of the 2003 World Cup. These represent the country’s three best performances in ODIs, but I doubt any of the aforementioned captains would make any counter-claim to my premise.

MS Dhoni leads a side that is bristling with extraordinary batting and bowling talent, but perhaps more importantly, a mindset that sees winning as the primary reason for playing. That is the biggest change that has come about in Indian cricket over the past decade, beginning with Ganguly’s tenure and reaching dizzying heights under Dhoni.

It was not always so. Indeed, just how bad it used to be can be gauged from the fact that in the first two World Cups (in 1975 and `79) India won only one match — against lowly East Africa — and in fact had several unsavoury performances to their (dis)credit. Therefore, when Kapil’s Devils beat odds-on favourites West Indies in the final, the cricket world had been turned upside down, so unexpected was the result.

The problem in the early years of limited overs cricket in India was that most players of that generation saw this as just a diversion or a chore, not the real thing. They played without purpose, leave alone pizzaz, and this was evident in the inconsistent performances. It’s a different world now, and the Indian players’ responses have changed dramatically with the times, Tendulkar in many ways being the bridge between the old generation and the new.

Considering that he has been around for almost 20 years, he has greater first-hand experience of this transformation in mindset than any other player. Indeed, many fellow players and experts reckon that Tendulkar himself impelled this change with his brazen aggression which inspired players like Sehwag, Yuvraj, Gambhir, Raina and a host of others who now make the Indian team so exciting to watch and so formidable to beat.

One thing which has escaped Tendulkar, of course, is a World Cup triumph, and it is evident that this haunts him. He has made it public that he wants to play on till 2011 to have one more shot at the title. This has raised the question — quite legitimate — whether he can last that long, but which has often been answered by spurious logic.

It is absurd to expect Tendulkar to bat as he did in say, even 1998. Indeed, he should not compete with Sehwag, Yuvraj, Raina, etc in power strokes. That would be egotism, hardly commonsensical cricket. Moreover, Tendulkar’s value to the side today has to also be assessed more in terms of his being a lodestone, a binding force in the testosterone-driven current Indian dressing room — apart from continuing to be looming psychological threat to the opposition.

As he showed at Christchurch the other day, age has hardly withered his enjoyment for the game, his focus to play a long inning or his ability to improvise. What it has affected is his fitness, which means that he will have to work that much harder over to keep his ambition of playing the 2011 alive. Two years is a long time, and it will need perhaps a specialised regimen to keep his weary body in shape.

Summing up motivation for this, I reckon, emerges as Tendulkar’s biggest challenge in the coming months; as much as winning the 2011 World Cup would be for Dhoni. Their destinies, in that sense, must find common cause to ensure that Kapil, Sunny and Sourav don’t have reason to believe this team wasn’t indeed the best.