AFTER SACHIN TENDULKAR, KOHLI ARRIVES
For long-serving fans of Indian cricket, there is no greater delight than to watch history being written. Soon after Tendulkar’s retirement emerged Virat Kohli from the sidelines, and he’s now carrying the legacy of Indian batting forward.
Sachin Tendulkar refuses to be cast away from the limelight. Though it has been fifteen months since he retired from all cricket, his brand and his persona continues to shine. He still appears in many television endorsements, and he’s also the official ICC brand ambassador for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. For the India-South Africa game, the biggest cheer around the stadium went up when he made an arrival and had a small chat with officials about this and that.
And then, of course, he took a selfie. He’s rolling with the times.
Vivian Richards, the former West Indian batsman and a legend in his own right, recently wrote a column for the ICC about the greatest ODI batsmen in the world, and he once again named Sachin Tendulkar as his favourite. He was not the biggest batsman in the world, he said, but as we all know, good things come in small packages. Until 2013, Sachin Tendulkar was a shoo-in for any all-time one-day team picked to play anywhere in the world, and that, he said, was a huge compliment.
The West Indian ace also said that he would still pay money to watch him bat.
He also reserved effusive praise for Virat Kohli, whom many Indian fans have already crowned as Tendulkar’s successor. Just twenty-six now, Virat already has 22 ODI hundreds and ten Test hundreds. If there is anyone who will scale the mountain of hundred hundreds that Tendulkar climbed first, it should be Virat.
The baton has well and truly passed, first from Sunil Gavaskar to Tendulkar, who carried it admirably, and now it has gone into the hands of Virat Kohli. Only time will tell how far he will run with it.
