Glenn McGrath on how he got the better of Sachin Tendulkar
While you never knew what you’d get from Brian Lara when he took strike, Sachin Tendulkar was always the same. It was impossible to use Sachin’s ego against him, and he was prepared to tough it out and wait for a bad ball from which to score runs.
Everything he did appeared to be so measured; he was technically correct, mentally strong and very disciplined... I also observed Sachin to be self-assured and confident in who he is — there were no insecurities. If that’s having an aura then, yes, he had an aura...
The first time we crossed swords was in a one-day international tournament at Sharjah in the mid-1990s when he was 20. I remember in the build-up to the series, all of the talk centred around this young bloke and how he would be cricket’s next great batsman. I was keen to see how he performed.
When I ran in to bowl he was on six runs and he attempted to play the pull shot, but because I managed to get extra bounce from the ball, he hit it straight to Mark Taylor at short mid-wicket. The next time we opposed one another was in Test cricket in a one-off Test in Delhi and I dismissed him for a duck when the ball found his inside edge and uprooted his leg stump.
While our meeting had a great start — for me, at least — it only got harder. In nine Tests I dismissed him on six occasions, and every time I got him was a great cause for celebration. The reason for this was obvious — he was so skilled and, on his day, quite brutal.
That brutality was rammed home in the 1996 World Cup when we played against India in Mumbai. He scored 90 off 84 deliveries before being stumped by Ian Healy off Mark Waugh’s bowling. I enjoyed a good start in that match until Sachin pulled one of my deliveries for four and that appeared to be the catalyst for him to hit the "go" button. Regardless of whether it was a poor delivery or a peach of a ball, he had no problem despatching them around the ground.
During the post-mortem I realised we had made a mistake in that innings — he got away with what I think could have been called a lucky shot when he hit that four but we changed our approach to bowling at him. Rather than continuing to bowl just short of a good length, we pitched the ball up and tried to get him with a yorker. It was never going to trouble him, especially on his home ground (on a typical subcontinent pitch that favours the batsman) and in front of a home crowd who treated every shot as though it was a gift from heaven.
Bowling just short of a good length worked better for me in Australia and other countries that favoured bounce, because I could (and did) use it to my advantage when we faced off for World Cup matches in England and South Africa. When we played India in the Super Six stage of the 1999 World Cup, the stakes were high because a loss would have ended our campaign; we naturally earmarked Sachin as a dangerous man but I had him caught behind for a duck by Adam Gilchrist.
Then, in the 2003 World Cup final played at Wanderers in South Africa, India was trying to run down our 360 and when Sachin blasted my second ball of the innings to the boundary we took that as his signal of intent. I bowled my third ball to him at a similar length but it was a tad shorter and because it bounced a little more, he hit it straight up in the air and I caught it to dismiss him for four — the groans from the Indian-dominated crowd were deafening.
(Test of Will: What I've Learned from Cricket and Life? by Glenn McGrath has been published by Allen & Unwin, and can be read on www.juggernaut.in.)
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