I love it when people go "his 100 will overshadow problems blah blah". Seriously whoever thinks along those lines DOES NOT KNOW how Indian cricket works.
I can bet anything that even if Tendulkar had got his 100 in England or Aus and we still lost 4-0 our selectors wouldn't have done anything different than they are now. We played crap over the course of 8 test matches. That's all there is, nothing more. People can knock on our bowling effort all they want, but the fact is that our batting wasn't good enough to cross 300 in 15 of the 16 innings we batted. Absolutely 0 scoreboard pressure to work with for our bowlers (and barely any rest). Rahul Dravid retiring and hopefully Laxman also calls it quits soon would be the best thing to come out of our losses. Time to get the young guys in and if they fail that's fine.
Also why are we blaming only the Indian media again? The media as a whole deserves blame, every English and Australian news article was going gaga over the potential of it happening so it's hardly only India who's hyped it up.
It's amusing to note how quickly those who can't handle any sort of balanced and objective assessment of Tendulkar rush in to twist the words of anyone they see as a dissenter. Clearly Tendulkar has become for some here a sort of idol who must be defended at all costs. How sad.
Now as for my actual post - as opposed to what some rather excitable persons imagined I wrote -, firstly, I have not once mentioned Indian media or blamed Indian media pressure on Tendulkar's failure to get to this milestone. Nor have I claimed any special knowledge of "how Indian cricket works". It is not necessary to know how Indian cricket works because the facts speak for themselves, and an intelligent observer should be able to decide for himself regardless of whether he is located in Manchester or Mumbai.
My critique was not about the media; rather I stated pretty plainly my belief that the milestone itself is completely artificial. No one was adding together Test centuries and ODI centuries before, as if they had the same value. ODI centuries, of which Sachin has no less than five against Kenya and Namibia, and another five I think against weak Zimbabwe attacks, have far less value and thus this 100 centuries hype is fundamentally flawed.
I did not mention the Indian media or blame their pressure on his failure to get it because for me it is quite immaterial whether the hype about this fake milestone leading to the "pressure" emanated from the media or not: the fact is it is a completely spurious achievement.
And for those trying to play the "it's not only an Indian obsession" card: pull the other one. Firstly, India has form. Imran made a very perceptive comment some time ago with respect to Tendulkar's quest and implicitly or perhaps explicitly name checking Richards when he said that real champions don't need to compile meaningless personal milestones to persuade others of their greatness: their real achievements speak for themselves. For me, Imran is one of the six or seven greatest cricketers that ever lived, yet the look in his eyes when he (or any other bowler from that era) talks about bowling to Richards tells me all I need to know about how truly great the master blaster was. He is great precisely because he does not need to pad out his stats with four meaningless ODI centuries against Kenya to prove it.
Yet Indians never get the point. Perhaps because they are so hopeless at sport in general - the country in the world with the lowest number of total Olympic medals per capita - they somehow lose all perspective when they have someone they see as a champion and succumb to the all-too human failing of making up for their failures in other sporting areas by artificially buffing him up - but their proselytism inevitably has the opposite effect.
The whole world knew that Kapil Dev was a great bowler and great allrounder, but only
India would have allowed him to go one for so many matches when he was clearly past his prime and taking wickets at an inefficient rate that would not have justified his place in the team were he not Kapil (and keeping out a young Srinath who at the time was bowling beautifully) just so that he could break Richard Hadlee's record.
As if the aggregate for most Test wickets meant sweet f**k all outside the context! So what happened when Kapil eventually overtook Hadlee? It only served to highlight just how incomparably superior the New Zealander was, striking at something like six or seven runs a wicket (I'm typing from memory so could be wrong here) cheaper and with a far superior strike rate.
It
is an Indian problem because Indians like the posters who have just responded to me do not seem to understand sport and what constitutes true sporting greatness! You do not become a sporting legend by double entry bookkeeping. An accountant might have advised Kapil that by breaking Hadlee's record he would fulfil all the criteria to recognized as the best, but for those who know and love the game it actually proved the opposite and
ruined any sort of case he might have had for seriously belonging to the debate involving Imran, Botham and Hadlee about the great allrounders of that era.
This is because by the time he had acquired his fool's gold his stats, and more importantly the memory people had of him in his sad closing years, made it look like he had been a hack all along and not the top class new ball bowler - if a significant step below the above-mentioned three - that he had been in his prime!
Similarly Tendulkar is in danger of tarnishing his own considerable achievements in pursuit of the fool's gold of a quite meaningless personal stat which I can tell you now is not even taken particularly seriously outside his homeland. There is a huge difference between lazy journalists filing copy they know will play well with diaspora readers when India is on tour and genuine interest in say England or Australia in some of the more arcane details of the Indian quest to prove that they have produced the second-greatest or even greatest batsman of all times. In reality one of Tendulkar's own teammates during his Test career has better claim to that title,and this inglorious quest of the last year or so has if anything only served to underscore the fact that Tendulkar has actually gone backwards in the second half of his career. If he had trusted his instincts and really gone for it after the glorious burst of his prime years, he would not perhaps have the stats he has today, but would be remembered far more favourably than the play-it-by-the-percentages player he has been for at least the past decade.
) is life. Using that to say he plays only for personal glory is daft. 
