Gratis Mind

Heres Prem Panicker’s take on Tendulkar’s loss of agressive play in recent times..

From watching him play, I don’t think he has lost that ability to read the game, to think not just of the ball that is coming at him but a few balls into the future. You say that about bowlers—that they bowl to a plan, work on a succession of deliveries that, collectively, are like moves in a chess gambit, intended to open up a batsman’s vulnerability and prey on it. Sachin is perhaps the only batsman I know of who bats that way—thinking several moves ahead of the game.

So why is he no longer the annihilator? I’d think a combination of back, elbow, and eye, all coalescing into a situation where the mind is willing, but the flesh won’t quite oblige.

Thing is, there has always been an element of premeditation about Sachin’s game. He tends, at times, to predict in his own mind what the bowler will send down, and pick his shot ahead of the actual delivery. His big plus was speed of thought—predictions can go awry, but Sachin got away with it because he had the quickness of mind and eye to spot when he was wrong, and adjust his shot accordingly.

His back and elbow problems have forced him to cut out certain shots (when for instance was the last time you saw him go forward, then lean back to get under the ball, and with that checked punch, hit straight up and over the bowler’s head—a shot that puts stress on back and elbow both?); I suspect that it has also bred in his mind the knowledge/belief that he cannot adjust as rapidly as he was used to. That in turn has increasingly forced him to avoid premeditation, of the kind that in his prime used to leave bowlers stunned (By way of example, think back to that home series against South Africa, when Fanie de Villiers twice in two games got him out flicking at the slower ball and being caught at short midwicket. Came the third game, Fanie set it up and sent down the slower ball on cue; Sachin went back, gave himself space, waited on it and heaved it to the midwicket boundary; when Fanie tried the trick again next over, Sachin actually skipped down and blasted it wide of the short midwicket and to the boundary again. After playing that second shot, he ran down the track, smiled at the bemused bowler, and said ‘Not today, Fanie’. De Villiers was the one who told me of this incident; “That man can read your mind”, he said then).

My point is that these are all elements in the Tendulkar playbook: quickness of eye, an ability to play shots that are not part of anyone else’s repertoire, the knack of getting inside a bowler’s head and messing with his mind…

Time and injuries have eroded those qualities; increasingly, Sachin finds himself playing one game in his mind, and quite another one out there on the pitch (this could also explain some of the peculiar positions he gets himself in these days). And as the divide between what he imagines and what he is able to execute widens, he looks increasingly mortal, at times comically tragically so.

I doubt that is the full answer; I am not even sure there is one definitive answer to the question—but based on his play, this is the feeling I increasingly get, of a once-immortal player struggling with increasing intimations that he is after all mortal; that his mind may retain its abilities, but the body is not equipped to keep pace.