Tendulkar v Australia: Desert Storm, Warne and the Method

Every great batter needs a great opponent, and Sachin Tendulkar's was Australia. Not a single bowler — an entire cricketing culture, the best team of his era, which arrived in his path at every stage of his career and against which he produced most of his defining innings. The rivalry ran for twenty years, and inside it sits nearly everything worth knowing about how he actually batted, as opposed to how he is remembered.

Perth, 1992: the innings the opponents remember

The relationship began on the 1991–92 tour, when an eighteen-year-old made 148 not out at Sydney and then 114 at Perth on the fastest pitch in the world, against an attack including Merv Hughes and Craig McDermott, in a match India lost heavily. The Perth hundred is the one Australians of that generation cite. It was made almost entirely off the back foot, cutting and punching balls that had his senior partners hopping, and it announced the technical signature that would define him: a short man who judged length earlier than anyone else on the field and therefore played the rising ball with time to spare.

Hughes reportedly told Allan Border during that series that the teenager would end up with more runs than Border himself. It was the sort of thing fast bowlers say. It also turned out to be a considerable underestimate.

Preparing for Warne, and the 1998 home series

By 1998 Shane Warne was at his height, and Australia's tour of India was billed, without much exaggeration, as a personal duel. Tendulkar's preparation for it has become one of cricket's best-known training stories: he had leg-spinners bowl at him into the rough outside his leg stump on scuffed practice pitches in Chennai and Mumbai, rehearsing specifically for Warne's line of attack, days before the series began.

The rehearsal held. In the first Test at Chennai he came in with India in trouble in the second innings and made 155 not out, using his feet to hit Warne against the spin over midwicket — the precise shot he had drilled. India won the series 2–1, Tendulkar dominated it, and Warne produced the most quoted concession of his career, that he had nightmares about Tendulkar dancing down the pitch at him. The two remained friendly for the rest of Warne's life, and the mutual respect never carried an ounce of doubt about who had won the argument in 1998.

Desert Storm: Sharjah, April 1998

The same year produced the one-day innings his generation regards as his best. In the Coca-Cola Cup at Sharjah, India needed to beat Australia — or at least overhaul a run-rate target — in their final group game to reach the final. Midway through the chase a sandstorm stopped play, the target was revised, and Tendulkar resumed against Warne, Damien Fleming and Michael Kasprowicz in swirling residue with the equation tightened. He made 143, took India past the qualification mark almost single-handedly, and the innings acquired its name before the presentation ceremony had finished.

Two days later, in the final, on his twenty-fifth birthday, he made 134 and this time won the match itself. Two innings, forty-eight hours apart, against the best team in the world, one to qualify and one to win. If you want a single reason his reputation carries the mythic register it does, the pair from Sharjah is most of it. Everything about the record-keeping side of his career can be tabulated; Desert Storm belongs to the smaller set of performances that people who watched them describe in the tone reserved for weather.

Sydney 2004: the hundred made of refusals

The most revealing Test innings he played against Australia contained almost no risk at all. Arriving at the SCG in January 2004 in the worst run of his career — a series of dismissals caught in the cordon driving outside off stump — he made a decision that has been studied ever since: he would not cover drive. For over ten hours he simply eliminated the shot that was getting him out, scoring 241 not out built on leg-side placement, the straight drive and the punch off his hip, waiting for the bowlers to stray rather than imposing himself on them.

It was the least beautiful major innings of his life and arguably the most impressive, because it showed the machinery under the artistry. Batting, in his conception, was a discipline of subtraction — you find out what the conditions and the bowlers will let you have, and you decline everything else, for as long as it takes. Younger batters raised on his highlight reels tend to copy the flourish. The professionals who played with him copied the subtraction.

The method itself

Strip the career to technique and a few constants explain most of it. He was five feet five, with a heavy bat and a grip low on the handle, and his balance at the point of release was close to perfect — head still, weight neutral, committed to neither front foot nor back until the length declared itself. That neutrality is why he had no real weakness for bowlers to plan around: the short ball fed his cut and pull, the full ball fed the straight drive that became his trademark, and the good length was met with a defence compact enough to bore an attack into error.

The method evolved twice under duress. A back injury in 1999 and a tennis elbow that needed surgery in 2004 each cost him power, and each time he rebuilt as a slightly more restrained batter — fewer aerial shots, more accumulation through placement. The Tendulkar of 2008 to 2011, who averaged in the fifties in Tests deep into his late thirties, was the third distinct version of the same batter, running on judgement after the explosiveness had been paid out. Adam Gilchrist and other opponents from the peak years have said the later version was harder to bowl at, which is the kind of compliment only professionals think to give.

The record against the best attack of the era

Across his career Australia fielded Glenn McGrath, Warne, Brett Lee, Jason Gillespie and Stuart MacGill against him in various combinations, supported by the relentless catching of the Ricky Ponting-era sides. Against that opposition Tendulkar scored eleven Test hundreds — more than he made against any other country — along with nine in one-day internationals. He averaged more against Australia than his career mark, which inverts the normal relationship between batters and the strongest attack of their time.

The one blemish came at the end. On the 2011–12 tour of Australia, a thirty-eight-year-old Tendulkar was worked over along with the rest of a fading batting order in a 4–0 defeat, the hundredth hundred still pending and visibly weighing on him. Australia, characteristically, granted no farewell sentiment; it took the staged goodbye at the Wankhede two years later to supply the ending the rivalry never would.

The 2003 final, and the limits of one man

The rivalry also contains his most painful day. The 2003 World Cup final at Johannesburg matched the tournament's best batter against its best team, and the team won emphatically. Chasing 360, Tendulkar mistimed a pull at McGrath in the first over and was gone for 4; the match effectively went with him. It is the cleanest illustration of the constraint that ran through his whole career: one batter, however great, is a minority interest in an eleven-a-side game. Australia beat India in that final because they were better at ten other positions.

That constraint is also why the Australia innings matter so much to his reputation. Against weaker attacks, his numbers could be dismissed as accumulation. Against the strongest side of the modern era — a team that lost almost nothing anywhere, as any history of the period records — he kept producing his best work, in their conditions and his own, from age eighteen to thirty-seven. Warne, who spent more hours bowling at him than anyone, settled the ranking question whenever he was asked: the best he ever bowled to, ahead of Lara, with daylight a matter of taste.

Australians are not sentimental about opponents. About this one, uniquely, they are.