Sachin Tendulkar plays last Test, delights VVIP fans

As Sachin Tendulkar made his way back to the pavilion, out for 74, he stopped briefly near the boundary rope. And almost as an afterthought, he turned around, raised his bat and acknowledged the crowd. With this gesture, the batsman conveyed to the world that he has played his last innings.

West Indies with seven wickets in hand and a mountain to climb are not expected to make India bat again. And, the man, whom even many atheists refer to as the ‘God’ of cricket, is in all probability not going to take the crease again.

Earlier on Friday, the customary deathly silence that follows Tendulkar’s dismissal, returned to haunt when the legend was caught in the slips just when it looked like he was set to lace his farewell cake with a century for icing.

Before his dismissal, people were talking about how a 150 would take his aggregate to 16,000 runs. And how a triple century would tick a glaring empty box in his career. None of it happened.

What happened, however, was that Tendulkar gave his fans something much more special. He played an innings that reminded his fans of why they fell in love with his batting in the first place.

Carrying on from a flawless overnight opera of 38, Tendulkar began with a couple of boundaries off Shane Shillingford. First an exquisite cut through the point leaning on his backfoot and the next a paddle sweep.

He brought his half-century with a straight drive off Tino Best that had the gentleness of a mock slap to discipline an aah-so-cute errant baby. If there was a ball to be hit, he went for it. It could have been the teenaged Tendulkar at
the crease.

The hallmark of his innings was how he played without shackles. His runs didn’t feel like the tinkling of a coin falling into a piggy bank. On Friday, Tendulkar was Uncle Scrooge gleefully emptying a bag in his gigantic coin house.

Rohit Sharma and Cheteshwar Pujara cracked tons, symbolising the passing of the baton to the GenNext. Tendulkar, in a day or two, will be part of cricket’s past. Perhaps this is what was in his mind, when he stopped near the boundary rope. He knew he was about to step into history.