Sachin Tendulkar: Peerless in crisis situations

From the day he walked out to bat for the first time in Karachi with the score reading 41 for four, Sachin Tendulkar’s batsmanship has been a constant war against crisis situations. Arunabha Sengupta lists the great man’s sublime knocks played under pressure while trying to find the reason behind the weird myth that he fails under pressure.

From the day he walked out to bat for the first time in Karachi with the score reading 41 for four, Sachin Tendulkar’s batsmanship has been a constant war against crisis situations. Arunabha Sengupta lists the great man’s sublime knocks played under pressure while trying to find the reason behind the weird myth that he fails under pressure. 

In his first Test match, he walked as a 16-year-old against Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Abdul Qadir with the score reading 41 for four. A spanking on drive was the highlight of his brief 15-run knock. But it did set the tone for the story of his life. Monumental pressure engulfed the stadium whenever he trotted down the steps of the pavilion and looked back at the sun — the hostile bowling of the opposition, perversely spurred on by the gargantuan expectations of countrymen.

And with time the gems would emerge sparkling and resplendent – chiselled and perfected by the red hot flame of circumstances.

In spite of the innings after innings that flowed from his bat, rising past the turbulent waves of wicket-falling crisis and the billowing expectations of the most fanatical followers ever, there remains a fallacious perception that Sachin Tendulkar did not perform under pressure. He is not the ideal player in a crisis situation.

However, throughout his career he has done little else but notch masterpiece after masterpiece in circumstances that would have stifled a lesser player into suffocation. He has again and again leaped into the blazing fire that threatened to reduce fledgling Indian starts to ashes, and has come through often enough, carrying the innings, purified into the master that he is.

Saga of brilliance under pressure

In his second Test match he walked in at 101 for four and scored 59 before departing at a respectable 244 for five — a schoolboy against Imran Khan and Wasim Akram.

In his fourth Test he came in at 38 for four in the second innings with Pakistan charged up to force a win. He was hit on the nose by Waqar Younis, blood streamed from his face onto his pads, but he batted on to score 57, leaving the crease only after the match was secure and safe.

Things did not change much down the years. Whether he was scoring his first century –batting through the last day to save India at Manchester, or scoring his 51st, taking on Dale Steyn at Cape Town from a familiar 28 for two, the saga has been one of dazzling brilliance under relentless pressure.

As I analyse his career in crisis situations, by adhering to the most stringent definition for pressure, I find as many as 18 hundreds and 22 half centuries scored in Test matches under the most extenuating circumstances. India has produced very few players who have managed 18 hundreds in their entire careers. And there has hardly been any batsman in the history of the game who had to deal with pressure as much as Tendulkar has had to.

The question remains: Why then does this farcical belief make rounds  whenever Sachin Tendulkar is discussed ?

A technical explanation of the myth

On several occasions, I have outlined the reason for the myth in detailed articles summarising the various psychological biases.

Let me very briefly paraphrase the fallacy that occurs with respect to crisis situations.

To determine whether Tendulkar fails in crisis is akin to finding the conditional probability of the great man failing given a crisis situation – Probability (Sachin Tendulkar fails given a crisis situation) represented as P(Sachin fails|crisis) . This has a long Bayesian expansion.

Human beings are not Bayesian by nature. Ordinary fans do not remember scorecards with any degree of accuracy or even bother to. In most cases, memory is driven by immediate recall or the facts immediately available because of being severely highlighted headlines in the media.

The true expansion of the Bayesian is pretty complicated to the human mind:

P(Sachin fails| crisis) = [P(crisis|Sachin fails) x P(Sachin fails)]/[P(crisis|Sachin fails)xP(Sachin fails)+P(crisis|Sachin does not fail)xP(Sachin does not fail)]

Most men lose it when it comes to prior probabilities. In fact, in 1993, Dawes, Mirels, Gold and Donahue explicitly tested and confirmed that P(A|B) [Probability condition A given condition B] is most often approximated by the common human mind by P(B |A). This is called the Inverse Fallacy.

To explain with this specific example, let us suppose a normal fan is asked to estimate the probability of Tendulkar failing in a crisis situation. Rather than using data which is far too laborious for arm-chair analysis, majority will go by recall and representativeness. He will try to remember all the occasions of crisis.

In the past, an hour of Tendulkar at the wicket automatically meant that India had averted the crisis. So they will not register in memory as moments of crisis. People without sufficient attention to detail will seldom remember the situation when Tendulkar came in, and will not jot it down mentally as a moment of crisis. In the innings against Australia, faced with a total of 478, he scored 214 after coming in at 38 for two. But since India ended up scoring 495, this will not register as a crisis situation.

However, when Tendulkar has failed, very frequently Indian team has entered a difficult period. In the mind of the fan, these will create the impressive conjunctions of Tendulkar failing and crisis. Hence, estimated probability — Probability Tendulkar fails given crisis — is replaced with probability of crisis given Tendulkar fails. It is the representative heuristic – a normal fallacy of the human mind. P(Sachin fails |crisis)  becomes P(Crisis|Sachin fails). It is a classic case cognitive illusion.

The reaction of masses

The above had been explained in an article titled “Why do people criticise Sachin Tendulkar“, and had been published on CricketCountry as a series in October 2011.

While the response was enthusiastic, several replies when the article was tweeted underline the problem of the world of cricket fandom. There were hasty responses of the form, “Ha! Articles should  deal with why people praise Tendulkar.”

These replies emphatically demonstrate the world of cricketing perceptions. Majority will their opinions from headlines or 140 character tweets, and few delve deeper to arrive at an informed conclusion based on personal thought and analysis. Hence, it is not a phenomenon that can be countered with logical argument, no matter how many pages one writes.

However, while the belief cannot be eradicated we can do the very least and point at the evidence. Here is a sampling of Sachin Tendulkar’s innings played in situations that were played in situations that would be termed crisis in any dictionary.

Tendulkar’s performances under pressure in Test matches

Runs	Opponent	Venue	Date	Situation when he batted
58	vs Pakistan	Faisalabad	Nov 23, 89	101 for 4 – playing his second Test
57	vs Pakistan	Sialkot	Dec 9, 89	38 for 4 – in his fourth Test
119*	vs England	Manchester	Aug 9, 90	109 for 4 – facing defeat on last day
114	vs Australia	Perth	Feb 1, 92	69 for 2 – soon became 159 for 8
111	vs South Africa	Johannesburg	Nov 26, 92	27 for 2
85	vs West Indies	Mumbai	Nov 18, 94	11 for 3
179	vs West Indies	Nagpur	Dec 1, 94	49 for 2
122	vs England	Birmingham	Jun 6, 96	17 for 2
177	vs England	Nottingham	Jul 4, 96	33 for 2
169	vs South Africa	Cape Town	Jan 2, 97	25 for 3
92	vs West Indies	Bridgetown	Mar 27, 97	42 for 2 – on a fast wicket against Ambrose and Bishop
139	vs Sri Lanka	Colombo (SSC)	Aug 9, 97	9 for 2
113	vs New Zealand	Wellington	Dec 26, 98	112 for 3 – after trailing by 104 in first innings
67	vs New Zealand	Hamilton	Jan 2, 99	17 for 2
136	vs Pakistan	Chennai	Jan 28, 99	6 for 2
116	vs Australia	Melbourne	Dec 26, 99	11 for 2
52	vs Australia	Melbourne	Dec 26, 99	40 for 2 – facing defeat
97	vs South Africa	Mumbai	Feb 24, 00	39 for 2 – solo battled to 173 for 8
76	vs Australia	Mumbai	Feb 27, 01	25 for 2
65	vs Australia	Mumbai	Feb 27, 01	58 for 2 – with one batsman retired hurt and facing innings defeat
69	vs Zimbabwe	Harare	Jun 15, 01	32 for 2
155	vs South Africa	Bloemfontein	Nov 3, 01	43 for 2 – later 65 for 4
90	vs England	Bangalore	Dec 19, 01	22 for 2
79	vs West Indies	Georgetown	Apr 11, 02	21 for 2
117	vs West Indies	Port of Spain	Apr 19, 02	38 for 2
86	vs West Indies	Kingston	May 18, 02	25 for 2
92	vs England	Nottingham	Aug 8, 02	11 for 2
176	vs West Indies	Kolkata	Oct 30, 02	11 for 2 – in second innings, facing defeat
51	vs New Zealand	Wellington	Dec 12, 02	31 for 2
55	vs Australia	Mumbai	Nov 3, 04	14 for 2
248*	vs Bangladesh	Dhaka	Dec 10, 04	24 for 2
63	vs South Africa	Durban	Dec 26, 06	35 for 2
62	vs Australia	Melbourne	Dec 26, 07	31 for 2
68	vs Australia	Delhi	Oct 29, 08	27 for 2
103*	vs England	Chennai	Dec 11, 08	141 for 2 – chasing 387 on last day on spinning track
100	vs South Africa	Nagpur	Feb 6, 10	24 for 2
84	vs Sri Lanka	Galle	Jul 18, 10	42 for 2
214	vs Australia	Bangalore	Oct 9, 10	38 for 2 – facing 478  run total in first innings
146	vs South Africa	Cape Town	Jan 2, 11	28 for 2
56	vs England	Nottingham	Jul 29, 11	13 for 2
91	vs England	The Oval	Aug 18, 11	64 for 2 – facing innings defeat

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)

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