Title | : | Final Test Exit Sachin Tendulkar |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | - |
ISBN-10 | : | 9788184006360 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 220 |
Publication | : | First published January 1, 2014 |
Final Test Exit Sachin Tendulkar Reviews
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Sachin Tendulkar's last Test in November 2013 at the Wankhede Stadium brought the nation to a standstill. This book is about THE man, the match and everything around it....the author sat through the entire match in one of the common stands and got a feel of the match through the eyes of the people which made it special.
For many, Tendulkar's last match meant lot of emotional upheaval and the struggle later to come to terms with the fact that the batting legend won't bat again. And that is how the crowd and the city erupted around this landmark match as it was a mile stone for many of us.
Cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle's words in his foreword sums up the book just fine: "It wasn't just a cricket match. It was the largest collective outpouring of emotion." -
This book apparently came out of an article Dilip D'Souza was asked to write for EPW - cover Sachin Tendulkar's final match. Not from the press box but from the crowded stands, not so much the cricket match but the event, the 'import of the moment'.
And it really was much more of an event than a cricket match. A national board arranging a series for a single player is unheard of in the history of all sports, which BCCI could pull off because it is a superpower in the cricket playing world. That it chose to dedicate a series to the man whose rise to a larger-than-life stature among Indians has paralleled and symbolized BCCI's own rise to superpowerdom was fitting.
Both trace their roots to economic reforms in the 90s and the subsequent rise of the new Indian middle class. Their increased spending power is what transformed BCCI from a minor player to the richest cricket board in the world. It also transformed Tendulkar from cricketer to God, a transition catalyzed by all the new brands entering the Indian market that latched on to him to sell the hell out of their products.
And now that he was retiring, the retirement match was being organized with huge fanfare entirely as a Sachin-fest. Cricket took a far-back seat to the spectacle, something that the author found distasteful.
Clearly, there were some interesting themes to explore there. Yet the book disappoints. D'Souza ends up writing too much about the cricket --he describes each session of the match in detail, the notable plays, the cricketers, the cricinfo comments. D'Souza is not an expert on the game and has little to offer in way of cricketing insights. He describes the atmosphere and the reaction of the fans but it was not so very different from other matches really.
The parts where he does touch on the themes of BCCI's rise to power and Sachin's rise to stardom are slightly more interesting but way too brief. I had bought the book in the hope there would be more of that but that turned out to be not the case. One wishes that the author had stayed truer to his original brief and used the match only as a stepping stone for a deeper contemplation of the interlinks between economics, cricket, India, stardom and the significance of this strange Test series. -
3 stars just because of ending on the author's thoughts about Sachin, the man (Not a player), and mentioning Rahul Dravid here and there. Kind of boring in the beginning
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Dilip D'Souzas' understanding of each ball is amazing.he clearly knows cricket.not only that he clearly knows the math that goes into it.The application works for tennis and basketball too.
Of course the analysis of each ball was a bit too much for me.
It was his recreating the whole ambience and gauging the mood of the audience that will be remembered as long as Sachin is remembered.
His focus and concentration on the event is something else.That too for a contrived game which did not have much in the way of excitement.
For a cricket ignoramus like me, who has to rely on commentary to follow the game, his descriptions helped me visualise quite a few actions taking place. -
Note: Please do not confuse this with "Playing it my way".
Not a very good book. Drags a lot. Plenty of anecdotes from the cricketing world and other sports, but not gripping. The last passage, titled "Legacy" is a good over-view of why the nation loves Sachin so much. Hardly scratches the surface of the great Mumbai lore that makes up cricketing legend in India. Perhaps a Ram Guha or Shashi Tharoor or Vaibhav Purandare would've been much better.
Turned out to be a damp squib. -
An interesting premise for a book ( The final test of Sachin Tendulkar captured as "an event" rather than a mere cricketing contest) but Dilip's erudition fails to convert this promising idea into a great book. Over reliance on Cricinfo's comments and bland descriptions of action on the field pull the book down.
Definitely readable if one ignores the repetitive passages. The ground covered seems fit for a long essay rather than a full-fledged book. -
Though the premise is interesting, it gets banal most of the times.
The good thing is it's not written from a fan boy's perspective. -
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