Heartbreak!

It’s painful to watch Tendulkar’s brilliant knocks go in vain.

How do you define a match winner? The phrase is becoming increasingly common in cricket, as this is one sport that, though a team game, provides a great platform for individual brilliance. But is it fair to call one man (no one yet gives a damn about women’s cricket) the match winner when 10 others could have played crucial roles in the win, or made sure that the match was lost despite one man’s brilliance.

To cut this rambling to the chase, was Sachin Tendulkar a match winner on Thursday? That he cannot be because his team did not win. But was his knock a match winning one? It is difficult to say an outright no. Perhaps the way out of this is to say that Sachin deserved to win, though no one else in his team did.

This did not happen for the first time. As we talk of Sachin completing 20 years playing cricket at the highest level, we cannot ignore the debris of brilliant knocks which have gone in vain because he was the only one determined to win a team game.

The list is long, but here is a sample of Sachin’s innings in losing causes that hurt more:

• 137 as India lost to Sri Lanka in the 1996 World Cup. The only other 50 score was from Azhar. Manoj Prabhakar opened the batting with Sachin and scored 7 in 36 balls and conceded 47 runs in four overs when he bowled. 
   
• 100 against Pakistan in Singapore in 1996. India was all out for 226 in 47.1 overs. 
   
• 143 against Australia at Sharjah in 1998, chasing under lights. When Sachin was out, the team had scored 242 for 5 in 43 overs. We scored just eight runs in the next three overs. 
   
• 146 against Zimbabwe in 2000. The second highest scorer was Zaheer Khan with 32. 
   
• 141 against Pakistan at Rawalpindi in 2004. No one else touched 50. 
   
• 123 against Pakistan at Ahmedabad in 2005. The second highest was Dhoni’s 47, the third highest the 39 extras. 
   
• 100 against Pakistan at Peshawar in 2006. When Sachin got out, the score was 305 for 5 in 45 overs. The next five overs yielded 23.

These are one-day international matches. The one that still hurts the most is the loss of the Test match to Pakistan in Chennai in 1999, which was in many ways a replica of Thursday’s loss. Then, Nayan Mongia gave some support to Sachin as India chased 271 in the fourth innings on a minefield of a pitch. But, just like Raina left without completing his task on Thursday, so too did Mongia just after crossing 50. When Sachin got out, Indian needed 17 runs in 95 overs with three wickets in hand. The result is too painful to recount.