Playing It My Way: My Autobiography by Sachin Tendulkar

Author:Sachin Tendulkar [Tendulkar, Sachin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2014-11-05T18:30:00+00:00

The pool games

The less-than-impressive performances in our warm-up matches had made the first pool match on 12 February 2003, against the Netherlands, extremely important. We had to start well to give ourselves a fighting chance in the tournament. Even if the Netherlands were not the best opposition in the world, they had some good players in their team who had experience of playing on the county circuit in England. As I went out to bat, I was unusually nervous. The expectations in India were huge and the dressing room was also expecting a lot from me, now that they’d agreed to my wish to open the batting. I’d caused our plans to be changed completely and now it was up to me to deliver.

I was deliberately conservative in my approach at the start and set out to build a solid foundation before we went on the attack. We had been getting out for scores of 150 and less and it was important that we batted the full fifty overs and posted a reasonable total. I managed to score a half-century and, with Mongia contributing 42 runs down the order, we just passed the 200-run mark, making 204 all out. It wasn’t a score to rave about and we knew that with one good innings from a Netherlands batsman we might have a contest on our hands. At the team meeting before the start of their innings we agreed that we should play as if we had to bowl the opposition out for 150, to force us to apply ourselves properly. Eventually, it was Srinath and Kumble, with four wickets each, who helped us achieve that aim as we bowled them out for 136. We had not played our best but had still managed to win.

Our next match was against defending champions Australia at Centurion on 15 February. They were playing excellent cricket and were firm favourites to win the tournament again. We played a very bad game from the start and lost a heap of early wickets. I scored 36 and we were bowled out for a very poor 125 and lost the game by nine wickets.

Our underwhelming performances in South Africa so far were not going down well with supporters at home and we heard that some irate fans had vented their fury that evening by throwing tar at Mohammad Kaif’s home in Uttar Pradesh. It was alarming to read about the hostile reaction in India and I eventually had to issue a formal appeal, in the form of a media release, to try to pacify the fans. I stated that we were all trying our best and there was no dearth of commitment at our end. This had some effect and we were able to concentrate once again on the task at hand.

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