A view of Tendulkar's slippers
Several tributes to Sachin Tendulkar's record-breaking feat have come by the way of personal memories of the batsman
Nishi Narayanan
25-Feb-2013
AFP
Several tributes to Sachin Tendulkar's record-breaking feat have come by the way of personal memories of the batsman. Simon Wilde's are of Tendulkar's slippers. He writes in the Times:
They were like Aladdin’s slippers, curled up at the front and studded with jewels (at least they looked like jewels). Immediately it occurred to me that Tendulkar had placed them there because he didn’t want a stranger to see them. I felt like an intruder. Tendulkar has spent all of his adult life fighting for every precious moment of privacy he can find — the stories are legion of him going out in the dead of Mumbai’s night, sometimes in disguise, to escape the crowds — and here was I, prying into one of the few remaining spaces he could call his own, the space behind an armchair in a nondescript hotel room in Essex.
In the Hindustan Times Pradeep Magazine remembers first meeting Tendulkar, an Under-15 player then, on a wintry evening, in a town in Himachal Pradesh, where the two were sipping tea to keep the cold away.
Dylan Cleaver in the Herald on Sunday believes Tendulkar may not have been the best player of his generation - especially when you have Ponting, Lara, Dravid and Kallis - but he was certainly the greatest.
It is one thing to be facing Sir Richard Hadlee and Wasim Akram while puberty still has you in its embrace; it's even more remarkable to be comfortably fending off the next generation of fast bowlers, like Brett Lee, more than a decade-and-a-half later.
Nishi Narayanan is a staff writer at ESPNcricinfo