Sachin Tendulkar: Off-The-Field

Sachin Tendulkar completes 20 years of his career this week. A myriad of adjectives have been used to describe his greatness, and I don’t want to add to that huge list. After a while, words like ‘genius’, ‘legend’ and ‘master’ stop doing true justice. 

Sometimes pictures and videos speak much more than words. Here are a few interesting videos that I was able to find on the web.

Sachin has played innumerable great innings. Picking even a few would be next to impossible. A performer often reveals his true nature only when he is not on the stage. Hence my primary search focus was to find Sachin’s (often not so common) off-the-field clips. Here are five that caught my attention –

1. Tom Alter interviewing a 16 year old, shy Sachin.  Still, you can sense the underlying self-confidence in him.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oez4TSdZvJI

2. Sachin recounts his 1st Test and facing Wasim Akram, and how Test Cricket is a completely different game http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiwLKaP5moc

3. Harsha Bhogle unplugged on Sachin – a great 9 min clip where Harsha informally chats about Sachin’s ability   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-7jL7o8kYs

4. Sachin Tendulkar talks (in Marathi) about his coach Ramakant Achrekar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4d-6hBkDFQ

5. An emotional Sachin reacts at the unveiling of his wax statue for the Madame Tussauds Museum. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3fNpmBWMQ

Hope you enjoy these five clips on you-tube.  Here’s one on-field innings I will leave you with.

Sachin’s first Test Century  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngaeaKkWjdE

I know it might be a stretch even for Sachin, but I hope that he plays for another 5 years, and gets to 50 Centuries in Tests and ODIs! And yes, after that great 175 against Australia…wouldn’t it be nice to see him become the first batsman to score a double hundred in an ODI?