By Venkatesh Prasad
At the very beginning I must state that I never thought this day would come.
I very well know everyone has to call time on his career sometime or the other but the disbelief that we will no longer see the very familiar figure of Sachin Tendulkar still lingers within me.
Somehow I had thought, and I am sure I am not alone here, that here is one man who cannot retire.
His farewell, though, was most fitting.
A Test win in which he played a part, a series victory partly fashioned by players who were barely born if at all, is not the kind of gift everyone gets in his final Test.
But that’s exactly what Sachin got, a script most befitting. A hundred, yet another one, would have been the icing on the cake but the 70 we got to see instead was almost as pleasing.
What was better was the moving Guard of Honour accorded to him by Mahendra Singht Dhoni’s boys.
Obviously even as the demolition of the West Indies cricket team was the main focus, there had been time spent planning the great man’s send off.
We have all been part of Indian teams that had Sachin in it and know the esteem all his teammates have always held him in but here was a chance to show it on the field of play one last time and the boys rose to the occasion in style.
I have never before such a Guard of Honour.
Caught off guard as he was, Sachin’s emotions, always held lightly within during a long, long career, finally came to the fore. Used to fighting off and dominating bowlers around the world, here he was fighting the tears that had started to flow. Many of us wept too.
During his fantastic speech, one that was beamed around the cricketing world, Sachin read out what he had told the team ahead of his final Test.
He had asked the team to carry on playing for the country with pride and to respect the fact that they were the fortunate few to get an opportunity to serve the country through cricket.
How apt that even as he prepared to leave, the team and the sport were uppermost in Sachin’s mind.
The great man can rest easy, though. From what we have seen in this series and the ODI series against the Australians recently, there is enough talent in the current set-up to carry the team forward. Yes the void will never really be filled, after all you can’t replace the likes of Sachin, but then great players can take time to happen.
Finally, let me end by congratulating Sachin on the Bharat Ratna. The highest Indian honour on the final day of his sporting career, this sort of an ending can’t be bettered.