The year was 1994. India was playing Australia in a tournament in the Emerald Islands of Sri Lanka. It was an important phase for the former as far as 50-over cricket was concerned.
Two years ago, they failed to make it through to the semifinals of the 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and in two years time, they were to stage the World Cup in their own backyard along with their other Asian neighbours.
This was a phase when India were looking to understand the kind of players they will need and the roles they have to play at that event.
One of the decisions they took, keeping that tournament, in mind was promoting 21-year-old Sachin Tendulkar to the top of the batting order.
The call had proven to be a success with the Bombay bomber giving the team quickfire starts in the opening few overs on a consistent basis for the past 12-15 months. But Tendulkar couldn’t get his first limited-overs hundred as early as he did his Test hundred, despite having played well over 70 games.
But that was to change on the 9th of September 1994, as the Mumbai batsman managed to scale their feat against Australia at the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo.Electing to bat first, the right-hander gave India the ideal start, racing away to 50 in 43 balls even as others took time to get used to the slow nature of the pitch.
That, he took struggled a bit was evident, when made the next 60 runs in 89 balls as India made 246 for 8 in 50 overs, riding largely on his hundred.
A combined bowling effort was needed to dismiss a strong batting line-up and that’s exactly what the bowlers put in, with Manoj Prabhakar leading the way and the spinners chipped in as well to bowl them out for 215 and register a 31-run win.
Tendulkar was adjudged the Man of the match for his performance.
The turning point of his ODI career
The hundred proved to be a critical landmark for Tendulkar in his limited-overs career as over the course of the next few seasons, he proved to be a prolific run-getter in coloured clothing.
He was the highest run-getter in the 1996 World Cup, batting without a sponsor throughout the tournament , played two inspiring innings against Australia in the 1998 Coca-Cola Trophy to help India lift the title and was the mainstay, the aggressor as well as the rock, to the Indian batting line-up.
Needless to say that with each passing innings his reputation started to grow and it wasn’t until the initial part of the 2000s, when the likes of Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Yuvraj Singh arrived and shared the mantle, that the public began to depend not just on him for India to win.
Until then, for many die-hard supporters, the TV sets remained on till Tendulkar was in the middle and was off the minute he was out.
Not even to any politician have we used the line that he/she carried a billion expectations as much as we did with Tendulkar.He evoked that kind of emotions within Indian fans.
For 24 years in ODI cricket, he gave us some unforgettable moments, but it was the 9th of September that he got off the mark as far as his tally of hundreds in 50-over cricket was concerned.
