New Dehli: An Indian cricket fan can't help celebrate November 15, for it was the day that gave Indian cricket Sachin Tendulkar, the man whose bat ruled the game over the next 22 years and got the country's heart racing every time he was in the middle and made it skip a beat every time he got out.
Twenty-eight years ago on November 15, 1989, Tendulkar made his India debut in a Test against archrivals Pakistan in Karachi. Between then and November 16, 2013, in Mumbai, the master blaster scored 15,921 Test runs at an average of 53.78, including a record 51 hundreds in unprecedented 200 Tests. This was apart from 18,426 runs in 463 ODIs at an average of 44.83.
Tendulkar's 41 centuries in ODIs complete the magical number of 100 international centuries.
It will be an injustice to not mention Sachin the bowler, who could virtually bowl anything from seam-up medium pace to a googly, and it shows in his 46 wickets in Tests and 154 in ODIs, which included the best of 5/32.
In his debut Test back in 1989, Pakistan legend by the name of Waqar Younis also burst onto the international scene and left Tendulkar bloody-nosed with one of his express short-pitched deliveries.
But Tendulkar didn't leave the ground and kept playing, with Navjot Singh Sidhu partnering him on the crease.
Tendulkar scored 15 in his only knock of the match that India managed to draw, thanks to Sanjay Manjrekar's fighting century and Sidhu's 85.
Both India and Pakistan had two other players making their Test debuts in the same match - Sali Ankola and Shahid Saeed, respectively. Incidentally, for both the players it proved to be the only Test they played in their careers.
#OnThisDay in 1989, India and Pakistan legends @sachin_rt and @waqyounis99 made their Test debuts in the same match in Karachi! pic.twitter.com/Swb5AyBYKF
— ICC (@ICC) November 15, 2017
The match was also the 100th Test for India's legendary allrounder and World Cup-winning captain Kapil Dev.
Twenty-one years later, in the 2013 Mumbai Test against West Indies, Tendulkar decided to bid the game a goodbye as a tear rolled down India's cheeks seeing one of its favourite son retiring from the game.
