**CricketLine’s Tom Eaton assess the record of India’s finest Sachin Tendulkar. **
One-day cricket is in air in Nairobi - alongside the vultures which arrived on Saturday to feast on the remains of Australia - which gives us pause to consider that old chestnut, a One-Day Greats team. Viv Richards, Wasim Akram, Sanath Jayasuriya, Michael Bevan all crowd into the picture, but one name slips as easily onto the top of the list as on-drives do off his bat: Sachin Tendulkar. Of course! we cry, we must open the innings with the Jewel of India.
Heretics have a history of coming to sticky ends, so I’m off to Brazil as soon as this is published; for your devoted stats drone wishes to suggest the ultimate cricketing heresy. **Namely, Sachin Tendulkar is a mediocre one-day player. **
Already the rotten cats start to fly. Twenty five centuries! Nearly 8000 runs! The man is surely one of the top three one-day players of the last 20 years!
The statistics suggest a different picture. Yes, Tendulkar has an excellent average, a shade over 42 in 250 ODI’s up to the start of the current African safari. But let us see whom he has scored those runs against.
Sri Lanka’s cricketing prowess is only a few years old: for most of the 1990’s they were not serious opposition, and their bowling attack has always been a one-man show. In the context of this piece it is safe to group them with the minnows of world cricket. **And it is these minnows which have taken such a mauling from that heavy MRF bat: Tendulkar averages 53.03 against Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Zimbabwe and the UAE. **
**12 of his 25 hundreds have come in 75 matches against those sides. So he can plunder weak attacks. So what? This proves nothing. He still averages 38.01 against the stronger nations, a more than healthy average. **
The damning evidence comes when we look at where he scores his runs. Previous Stats Entertainment pieces have proved statistically the commonly held belief that the Subcontinent is a batsman’s paradise. While it never easy to score runs against the spin attacks of Asia on their pitches, it is, on the whole, easier to score their than elsewhere. And this is where Tendulkar cashes in.
In 162 matches on Subcontinental or Asian tracks - in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sharjah and Singapore - he has scored 6605 runs at 46.51. Conversely, on the harder, quicker pitches of Australia, England, South Africa and the like, he has managed a mediocre 33.94. A staggering statistic comes when we look at where his 25 tons have been scored: just 3 were made outside Asia, one of those against a weak Zimbabwe side.
True, he has played just 88 games outside Asia compared to 162 in; but at that proportion he should have made at least 8 hundreds outside of the Subcontinent. Clearly Mr Tendulkar is underachieving, in a big way. Add this to the fact that he has opened the innings 158 times, coming in when runs are there for the taking, and we see that Tendulkar’s reputation is writing cheques his bat can’t match.
To put Tendulkar’s efforts into perspective, Jacques Kallis - perhaps the most consistent batsmen in ODI’s at the moment - averages 39 against the established nations, almost 6 more than Tendulkar. Kallis has also plundered the minnows, taking 48.6 per innings on average off Kenya, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and the UAE, but four of his 5 hundreds have come outside the Subcontinent.
So how good is good in one-day cricket? We need look no further than Australia’s Dean Jones. A career average of 44.61 in 164 matches speaks of a man who knew the business end of a cricket bat, but his figures are even more astonishing when one realises that he played without fielding restriction, usually coming in at number four or five, with a slightly softer ball to hit.
If Tendulkar knows how to plunder weak attacks, Jones knew how to slaughter them. In 21 matches against Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe (the minnows of the 1980’s), Jones made 1012 runs at 92.00. Outside the Subcontinent, he pillaged runs at 45.27 per innings, notching up six of his seven hundreds.
No one can deny that Tendulkar is a great player. But what he is great at is open to debate. His Test record is up there with the best but it is open to conjecture whether he suffers from the general Indian disease of struggling away from home or whether the rest of the side’s inability to travel drags him down.
Taxi! The airport, and step on it!