Twenty-one years ago in England, he slammed his first Test century playing with a high backlift. These days, he gets by with the slightest. In a 1999 world cup match against Kenya, he scored a hundred with hardly any.
No batsman has adorned the modern game, except the funnily ingenious Shivnarine Chanderpaul perhaps, who has experimented with his stance, grip and back-lift so much over the evolution of his career and yet managed the same efficiency as Sachin Tendulkar.
The master has changed his playing style in innumerable ways; modifying, polishing and refining his technique. And there he is, awaiting history as the first man to scale the dizzying heights of 100 international hundreds.
Amazingly, he has never looked the worse for it. Never has a bowler felt he had a weakness to aim at. He may have got out - to a good delivery, a poor shot or sheer bad luck. But never because he was ugly and never because he did not have the means to deal with it.
As mind-boggling as his records are, the attention that the master blaster pays to his game is amazing in itself. That must have started right from the time his childhood coach Ramakanth Achrekar placed a coin on the middle stump as an incentive for any bowler who got the young genius out bowled — which no one did.
It hasn’t been any different ahead of the momentus nature of the Lord’s Test beginning on Thursday. He started practising at Lord’s much before his teammates arrived from the West Indies. Sachin started off with what many called the ‘hammer-grip’ with the bottom hand really low on the handle and the top-hand close to it, leaving a big chunk of the top part of the handle for the cameras to focus on.
It even generated debate if Tendulkar would be able to flower into the top class batsman that he was promising to become. But his performances, especially the stunning century on a lively track at the WACA in Perth during the Australian summer of 1991, never had anyone in doubt of his ability to deal with the fastest balls coming in his direction.
Tendulkar himself was later to say that he was not sure how his batting style would look like in the future.
Against the West Indies on a difficult and bouncy track at the Sawai Man Singh Stadium in Jaipur, Tendulkar brought on himself the displeasure of the original Little Master, Sunil Gavaskar. The reason: He employed a most uncharacteristic movement back and across just before the tall West Indian fast bowlers delivered. Unlike the trigger movement with their backfoot that some batsmen employ, Tendulkar had a second to himself in that not so elegant position. It was designed precisely to counter the pace and bounce of Cameroon Cuffy and company, which he did comfortably — with a hop into the line of the delivery. But when the pacemen pitched the ball up, thinking perhaps to trap him on the move, he drove them past the straight field for fours. He scored a hundred.
At the crease, he has tried being still, shuffling, moving back and across as well as trigger movements off either foot in preparation of a delivery. His ‘calculated riks’ to put off bowlers too have come off more often than not.
Awaiting cricketing immortality, what has he cooked up for the historic occasion at the Mecca of cricket?