Remember Chennai 1999? India versus Pakistan? Sachin Tendulkar almost seeing the chase through, before it collapsed in sight of the finish line? To this day, it remains a painful memory for Indian cricket fans. Actually, scratch that. That defeat haunts us.
Years later, this writer got the chance to speak to one of the Indian tail-enders from that infamous Chennai Test. “Just a matter of 12-15 runs”, I asked. “How did that even happen?”
“But it wasn’t just those runs. It was India-Pakistan. The pressure was so intense. When I walked in to bat, I couldn’t feel my hands inside the gloves or the bat handle,” his stoic face painting a real picture. Watching from the outside, sometimes, we are oblivious of these cricketers’ limits. Blindly unaware of their inability to push, or indeed, cross those limits in the case of some.
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Quite a few times, this limit has stonewalled the Indian team; the 1986 World Cup…