Book Extract | Test Cricket: A Biography: The Story of Test Cricket 1877 to Today by Tim Wigmore

The maidans are a characteristic of Indian cricket; their preva- lence helps to explain the abundance of Test players, especially batters, from Mumbai

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from Test Cricket: A Biography: The Story of Test Cricket 1877 to Today by Tim Wigmore, published by Hachette India.
THE TWO AGES OF TENDULK AR

Late in his life, Sir Donald Bradman identified the batter who played most like him. ‘I was very, very struck by his technique,’ Bradman said in 1996. ‘I asked my wife to come and have a look at him. Because, I said, “I never saw myself play. But I feel this fellow is playing much the same as I used to.”
‘It was just his compactness, his stroke production, his technique.

It all seemed to gel.’
The player’s name was Sachin Tendulkar.
Bradman later invited Tendulkar to his 90th birthday. ‘We dis- cussed batting,’ Tendulkar recalls. ‘How good batters could read the ball by looking at the bowler’s wrist position and also see which way the ball is spinning in the air and hence could read the delivery as soon as it was released.’
The man who would become the heaviest run-scorer in Test his- tory was first glimpsed on the maidans in Mumbai in the mid-1980s. Most days, the young Tendulkar – his father was a poet and univer- sity professor; his mother worked for the Life Insurance Corporation of India – boarded bus number 315 from the suburb of Bandra East to Shivaji Park.

The maidans are a characteristic of Indian cricket; their preva- lence helps to explain the abundance of Test players, especially batters, from Mumbai. Dozens of matches take place in parallel; the field in one game normally overlaps with the adjacent field, so that extra cover in one game might stand alongside midwicket in another. ‘Your peripheral awareness increased,’ Tendulkar reflects. ‘After having played on these maidans, when I started playing in stadiums with only one match happening at a time, suddenly finding gaps became easier.’

Aged 11, Tendulkar first met the coach Ramakant Achrekar. Ini- tially, Achrekar turned down Tendulkar for a place on his summer camp. Tendulkar’s older brother asked him to give Sachin another chance; Achrekar pretended that he wasn’t watching as he observed Sachin again. Achrekar took Tendulkar from one maidan to the next; he frequently played multiple games on the same day. The coach per- suaded Tendulkar’s parents to move him to a different school, which was better for cricket; Tendulkar relocated from his parents to his aunt’s, to be closer to Shivaji Park.

The young Tendulkar’s routine was relentless. During the summer, he batted for two hours in the nets from 7.30 a.m. Then, he went straight into a match at Shivaji Park, playing 55 games in 60 days one summer. Matches normally finished at 4.30 p.m.; by 5 p.m., Ten- dulkar was in the nets again for another two hours, each broken into five chunks. His practice would end with a final 15-minute session – this time on a wicket on the practice pitch. Achrekar placed a one rupee coin above his middle stump. Tendulkar could keep it if he survived the session without being dismissed; facing up to 70 field- ers, he had to keep each ball along the ground. After running two laps of Shivaji Park with his pads and gloves on, Tendulkar finally went home; he often spoke of cricket in his sleep.
‘The maidans gave me exposure to playing on different surfaces at a very young age,’ Tendulkar says. ‘Achrekar Sir, my coach, made it a point that I got to play on different surfaces against different bowlers.

‘A lot of these maidans were big grounds and had big boundary lines. Hence, one had to run quite a bit between the wickets to score runs, which can become tiring. And when you are tired, the first thing that happens is that you lose concentration. Playing in those maidans in my school days was a good way to train and develop the habit of concentrating and maintaining focus for long hours.’

At Azad Maidan, ten kilometres south of Shivaji, the Tendulkar name would first reverberate. In the Harris Shield, an annual inter- school tournament named after Lord Harris, Tendulkar played for Shardashram Vidya Mandir. In a semi-final against St Xavier’s in February 1988, when he was 14, Tendulkar walked out at 84–2, joining Vinod Kambli, a boy who was 15 months older and would play Test cricket alongside him. The two batted in unison until lunchtime on day two, when their team declared on 748–2; Kambli hit 349 not out, Tendulkar 326 not out. After the semi-final, Ten- dulkar was taken to the other end of the maidan and scored 178 not out in another game. Across the quarter-final, semi-final and final of the 1988 Harris Shield, Tendulkar’s scores read: 207 not out, 326 not out and 346 not out. Aged 15, Tendulkar made his first-class debut for Bombay; batting at his favoured number four, he scored 100 not out.

‘I have never seen so much concentration and stamina in one so young,’ said Raj Singh, then chairman of the national selection com- mittee, in April 1989. Aged 16, Tendulkar’s international entrance could scarcely have been more onerous: a Test series in Pakistan – India’s greatest rival, whose attack included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Imran Khan and Abdul Qadir. On debut in Karachi, Ten- dulkar scored one run less than his age; next Test, he hit 59.

In his fourth Test, in Sialkot, a Younis delivery deflected from the peak of Tendulkar’s helmet onto his nose. He had blood all over his shirt. The team doctor asked Tendulkar if he wanted to retire hurt. ‘No, I will play,’ Tendulkar declared. He batted on, ignoring signs that read ‘Child go home, and drink milk’. He flicked Waqar’s next ball to the boundary, and batted for over three hours for 57 to secure India a 0–0 drawn series. A year later, Tendulkar made his maiden Test century – only Pakistan’s Mushtaq Mohammad had got there at a younger age – to secure a draw at Old Trafford. Named player of the match, he was awarded a bottle of champagne; too young to drink alcohol, Tendulkar kept the bottle for years. Next day Tendulkar asked the team manager whether he had made any mistakes during his innings.
Many Indian batters were accused of struggling to match their feats at home abroad. Like Sunil Gavaskar before him, Tendulkar showed himself to be very different. Before turning 19, Tendulkar made centuries in England, South Africa and two in Australia.

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From his earliest days as a Test cricketer, Tendulkar invited compari- sons with Gavaskar. Both were only 5 ft 4 in; Gavaskar’s nickname of Little Master became Tendulkar’s. Both developed their craft at Shivaji Park, and were products of the Bombay School of Batsman- ship. Tendulkar combined orthodoxy and poise with an elan seldom associated with Gavaskar.

For all the similarities between the two, they emerged into very different countries. Gavaskar’s feats on the 1971 tour to West Indies were recorded only in 26 minutes of highlights of the entire series on Doordarshan, the Indian state broadcaster; there was not even live radio commentary.

In 1991, the year that Tendulkar turned 18, India underwent momen- tous changes. Manmohan Singh, the finance minister, announced a series of measures to liberalise the economy: devaluing the rupee; relaxing licensing restrictions for most industries (the so-called ‘Licence Raj’); and encouraging foreign investment. ‘No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come,’ Singh said, quoting Victor Hugo. Over the next 20 years, India’s economy grew by about 7 per cent a year. In 1991, India had one TV channel, Doordarshan; by 1996, it had 50.

Until 1993, Doordarshan had a monopoly over televising home matches. The Board of Control for Cricket in India even paid Doordarshan for the privilege of its games being broadcast. When England toured in 1993, the BCCI made a $600,000 profit on selling broadcasting rights for the matches: the first indication that Indian cricket could be monetised. Through promising Associate nations a greater share of cash from the competition, the subcontinental bid for the 1996 World Cup gazumped England’s Test and County Cricket Board.

‘The TCCB has not got over the Raj hangover,’ said the BCCI president I.S. Bindra. The World Cup allowed Jagmohan Dalmiya, a BCCI power broker, to test his belief that cricket could now make serious money. The 1996 World Cup organising committee sold the global broadcasting rights to WorldTel for $10 million, ten times the sum for the 1992 World Cup. The tournament even had an official chewing gum.

In the 1990s, globalisation and hyper-commercialisation helped to create a star whose global reach, popularity and wealth was unlike any that cricket had previously seen. Tendulkar had the runs and panache on the field. Off it, his alliance with Mark Mascarenhas, who ran WorldTel and became his agent, led him to become far richer than any cricketer before. In 1996, Mascarenhas agreed a contract which guaranteed Tendulkar about $6 million over the next five years, though he would receive much more. Tendulkar’s career, Sanjay Nagral wrote in Economic and Political Weekly, rode ‘the wave of the post-liberalisation mutant of the game with its spectacle, big money and fusion with the entertainment industry’.

In India, Tendulkar became ubiquitous in a manner that not even Gavaskar had rivalled. Only when driving around Mumbai in the early hours could he roam freely.

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Tim Wigmore Test Cricket: A Biography: The Story of Test Cricket 1877 to Today, published by Hachette India, 2025. Pb. Pp. 400

The first narrative history of Test cricket as it nears its 150th birthday, telling the story of how the game has evolved since 1877, told through the moments and personalities that have shaped the format. With a focus on the game and its broader significance alike Tim Wigmore gives Test cricket its historical and social context, whilst reminding us that it's unrivalled as a fascinating sporting spectacle. Meticulously researched and told with the passion of an award-winning writer, Test Cricket is also illuminated by a series of gripping fresh interviews with more than forty stars of international test cricket.

Tim Wigmore is the author of Crickonomics and Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution, which won the Wisden Book of the Year and Daily Telegraph Cricket Book of the Year in 2020. He is a sports writer for the Daily Telegraph, and has also written for The Economist, The New York Times, ESPN Cricinfo and The New Statesman.