da gbg bet： Among all of Sachin Tendulkar’s achievements over the years – and there are too many to be recounted – going past Steve Waugh’s world record of 168 Test caps must rank pretty high
Sidharth Monga at the P Sara Oval02-Aug-2010Tendulkar scales another mountain
da premier bet： In a career stretching almost 21 years, Sachin Tendulkar has missed 14 Tests. He missed his first one in his 12th year in international cricket, when he didn’t tour Sri Lanka in 2001 – India lost that three-Test series 2-1. Since then he hasn’t played the following matches: the first two Tests when Australia toured in 2004-05; the two-Test series in Zimbabwe in 2005-06; four Tests in the West Indies in 2006; a Test against Pakistan and two against South Africa in 2008-09.
Tendulkar’s Test career is so far the 11th- longest in international cricket. It’s the longest, though, among players who’ve started their careers after 1971.
Matches missed by batsmen who’ve played 140 or more Tests: Steve Waugh – 21 out of 168; Allan Border – one out of 156; Ricky Ponting – 23 out of 146; Shane Warne – 32 out of 145; Rahul Dravid – 3 out of 141; Jacques Kallis – 17 out of 140. Among the three other Indians to play 125 or more Tests: Anil Kumble: 27 out of 132; Kapil Dev: one out of 131; Sunil Gavaskar: four out of 125. (Click here for a full list of most consecutive matches played.)
The progression of the record for most Tests played since 1975: Colin Cowdrey – 114 (retd 1975); Sunil Gavaskar – 125 (retd 1987); Allan Border – 156 (retd 1994); Steve Waugh – 168 (retd 2004). (Click here for the complete list.)
Among all of Sachin Tendulkar’s achievements over the years – and there are too many to be recounted – going past Steve Waugh’s world record of 168 Test caps must rank pretty high. To have been considered good enough for India for so many matches, to have been fit for so long, to have outlasted almost all his contemporaries. Suresh Raina, India’s latest debutant, was still a toddler when Tendulkar bled on the pitch in Sialkot and said, ” [I’ll play]”.A day before he plays his record-making Test, Tendulkar put it, the “dream that I have been living”, in perspective. “The rest of things can be achieved, but for this you need an X number of years, an X number of tours, that’s when this thing happens,” he says. “And I am quite pleased. It has taken me 20-plus years to get here.”It’s wonderful that we have been able to play so much Test cricket. In the last few years we have played a reasonable amount of Test cricket. At one stage, in the early nineties, I hardly got any Test matches. Couple of Test occasions there were just two or three Tests in a year. It was disappointing. That is not the case now.”The thoughts, he says, go back to his first Test, in 1989, after which he thought he would never play a Test again. One-sixty-seven Tests later he says, “It’s been a long journey. I still remember the first Test I played. It was a completely different feeling altogether, compared to any form of cricket I had played. And since then it has worked out pretty well. Very happy that I have had this privilege of such a long journey at the international level.”Tendulkar spoke of the preparation that goes behind doing well for such a long time. “The journey has gone by very quickly, quicker than I expected,” he says. “Time flies. You just need to enjoy it, it’s a circle. You are not always on the top, sometimes there are rough patches, but the simple formula that I have followed is, whenever I have gone through tough phases, I have found a reason to work harder. And try and spend all my energy at something I have been wanting to get better at.”The pre-match preparation is extremely important. In that factor, I feel I have always been prepared. Sometimes I was able to achieve results, sometimes I wasn’t, but my preparations were always there. Really proud of it.”The journey has indeed been long. The third umpire was introduced in his time, and he is there when we are talking about UDRS too. In between have come enough triumphs, and more than enough heartbreaks to break down quite a few. Tendulkar is still saying, “”