The Man Who Never Got 100

How does it feel to contemplate Sachin Tendulkar’s feat of 50 Test hundreds from the vantage of another gritty Indian opener who got none?

The ball hit his bat first. That I was sure about. And he was given out leg before. He got upset. He hadn’t got enough runs in the series. Then I think there was a comment from one of the Australians… I didn’t hear that clearly. He started walking and motioned to me as well. I wasn’t very keen to go off. We walked towards the boundary. I slowed down, the manager asked me to stay on the ground. Vengsarkar was on his way down to take the field…”

That, in Chetan Pratap Singh Chauhan’s words, is what happened about 30 years ago at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. His partner was Sunil Gavaskar, of course. The second innings scorecard read Gavaskar lbw b Lillee 70.

Chauhan, at the other end, had dogged it out for 226 minutes.  A first Test hundred was 20-ish runs away. And he’d seen the man at the other end get there 20-ish times. He knew how it was done: but in the way non-strikers know.

In the previous Test match, at Adelaide, he had fallen short by three. Surely this time…

Chetan Chauhan lasted another 17 minutes in that innings, finishing with a plucky 85 that helped India win the game. Pluck was a word (or variations of it: courage, fortitude, and so on) used to describe him throughout his career— and in retrospectives. How he’d have liked to peel off the ‘p’. How he’d have liked to just have enough luck to get to three figures. Even if it was just the once: “I was never frustrated, but there is a thing called destiny, a thing called luck.”

And now I ask a man who never got a hundred in Tests whether he could imagine someone getting a half-century in hundreds. “I could never think of it. There just wasn’t enough cricket going on for someone to get there. It’s only in the late 80s and post-1991, post-liberalisation that there are so many games.”

Although that coincides almost exactly with Sachin’s career — as if there was a benign conspiracy to help him to 50 hundreds — Chauhan has a simpler explanation. Sachin, he says, “is from another planet.”

Chetan Chauhan got past 50 in approximately every fourth innings. When he got out on 85 in Melbourne, he may or may not have known that he was five
innings away from the end of his career. Even then, he performed to his averages: he got one more 50, a 78 against New Zealand. Another one that refused to convert.

He was a player from a different generation. He says he didn’t look at a hundred as a milestone. I find this odd. There, at the other end, was a man who was ruthless about his personal landmarks (and had a disregard, almost, for those of others, as the Melbourne incident demonstrated). We all knew this watching Gavaskar. But there was a compelling argument for milestones: individual performances help the team. Surely this should have spurred Chauhan on.

He had 68 opportunities, but has no explanation for why he didn’t get to three figures. “When we played, we had to first think of getting India to safety. That was the first thing. I thought much more about spending time at the crease. Blunting the attack to make it easier for those who came later. I wasn’t thinking of hundreds, I was thinking of a contribution to the team’s safety.”

As a boy, I had watched Chauhan play. I would love the way the ball would curve away from the point fieldsman as he square drove, its whizzing arc a stamp of its power. And even if it wasn’t the prettiest shot played, I would think, ‘Why doesn’t he do that more often?’

He wouldn’t because he was from a different generation of players. One that was about to be replaced by another type of cricketer. Kris Srikkanth, a decade or so younger than Chauhan, was different alright. He didn’t think of India’s safety (or that of his own wicket). He was incapable of this. He ended up, however, with very similar numbers to Chauhan: an average of around 30 in about 40 Tests. With two crucial differences: Srikkanth had two Test hundreds.

Srikkanth’s first Test century was a run-a-ball 116 against the Australians in Sydney, 1986. At the other end, Gavaskar got safely to 172, the traditional Indian way (513 minutes, 400 balls, match drawn). But Srikkanth was saying to everyone watching that he was the kind of cricketer that India would be producing. This different kind of cricketer wasn’t courageous; he was fearless.

In the early part of Sachin Tendulkar’s career, he was that type of player. He would hit cross-batted over mid-on. But Tendulkar had something else, a great understanding of the business of cricket. He worked out his game to optimise results. Part of this is about reaching milestones, let’s not kid ourselves. (Because it helps the team, remember?) But part of this is unequivocally about genius (try saying I’ll get a hundred today, and then go get it, even when playing with your son!). To Sachin’s credit, he lets out the genius more often than the businessman.

I remember one occasion when he showed it hurt. In Multan, 2004, the game in which Sehwag got 309, and Sachin was batting on 194 (having taken just a few balls less to get there). India declared. Or should I say Dravid declared, prompted by non-playing captain Sourav Ganguly.

Sachin had this uncharacteristic outburst. But by the end of the next day, every trace of bitterness at being left stranded because of an executive decision was gone: Tendulkar bowled Moin Khan as the sun was about to set. And his child-like delight after this event was greater than his disappointment at not getting the six runs to 200.

I bring this up only because Sachin would have most definitely got a double hundred that day. Another four overs and he would be there. You wouldn’t place the same bet on Chauhan at half the score. If he was close to a hundred, you thought you were close to the beginning of a Vengsarkar innings. That is destiny.

centurycricketSachin Tendulkar