England Lions v Indians, Chelmsford, 2nd day

Tendulkar stands alone

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan at Chelmsford

July 14, 2007

'Tendulkar's wasn't a flawless century, as two dropped chances indicate, but the beauty lay in its construction' © Getty Images

Watching the Indians bat today reminded one of the wretched times they endured while touring abroad during the '90s. The storylines were mostly the same: top-order crumbles to swing and seam, Tendulkar stands alone, lower-order support arrives before India stage some sort of recovery. Through the previous decade Tendulkar was India's Atlas Abroad, constructing masterpieces amid the surrounding wreckage.

There was an eerie familiarity when the scoreboard read: 2 for 1, 2 for 2, 14 for 3 and 65 for 4. It's when you usually asked yourself "Is Tendulkar still batting?" (In the last five years you'd probably first ask about Dravid but he was rested for this encounter and that wasn't an option). Luckily for the large crowd of Indians who'd landed up at Chelmsford the answer was a reassuring one, until he fell twenty minutes before stumps.

Tendulkar's wasn't a flawless century, as two dropped chances indicate, but the beauty lay in its construction. The early salvos were emphatic - a feather-touch down the ground here, a delicate flick through midwicket there, a crackling square cut here, a dab to fine-leg there. It was a most assured counter-attack against a pumped up bowling attack making the most of the new ball. Tendulkar possessed the mastery that the rest lacked but he also displayed tremendous application under pressure, something the other batsmen fell short on. He was to later term the pitch as a "good" one and said it was mainly the wind factor that one needed to be wary of.

It was his first first-class match in nearly two months but he paced his innings superbly. "Having been around for reasonable time," he said with a particular emphasis on the word reasonable, "I know when to accelerate and when to hold back and be patient. I read the situation and it's a lot to do with the way my body is moving, the way I'm thinking as well. You can't go out everyday and try bang, bang, bang and say it's my natural game."

Some good scores in the recent one-dayers have no doubt helped but a break of two weeks seemed to have produced not a jot of rust. "Till yesterday I was a little apprehensive, I wanted to go out and spend some time in the middle. I had reasonable net practise but in the match situation I wanted to be out there. Conditions are going to be different. I'm relieved I managed to play more than 200 balls."

"It was important especially because after Ireland we didn't play cricket at all, it's almost a couple of weeks now. It puts you in a different frame of mind and it was important that I get back to reality with the Test matches just 4-5 days away. Scoring runs in Ireland really helped. The conditions were adverse and wickets were helpful. That South African attack is quite good and I managed to score runs there. I had a couple of big sessions at Hove, practising indoors and that helped."

A nudge to point, shortly after tea, took him to hundred and his reaction was instructive. On completing the run he began a big swing of the bat but stopped half-way through the motion. It's just the start of a long tour, he seemed to be saying, and there will be plenty more bat-swings to come.

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan is assistant editor of Cricinfo

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