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'Even Siri doesn't know where to bowl to Sachin': Australia great's 'Tendulkar-centric' obsession
Sachin Tendulkar scored 3077 runs in 71 ODIs and 3630 from 39 Tests including a total of 20 centuries against the five-time World Champions Australia.
The rivalry between Sachin Tendulkar and Australia was second to none. Throughout the 1990s till the 2011 World Cup, Tendulkar loved batting against Australia and feasted on their bowling attack. Some of the finest moments of Tendulkar's career – the twin centuries in Sydney and Perth, his first ODI hundred, the Sharjah epic, the memorable 241 not out at the SCG and the CB Series final in 2008 – all came against Australia spread across various stages of his career. Australia was one of Tendulkar's favourite opponents, and the statistics back it up – he scored 3077 runs in 71 ODIs and 3630 from 39 Tests including a total of 20 centuries against the five-time World Champions. Talk about domination.
While Tendulkar's battles with Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee and Shane Warne will always remain the stuff of legends, he shared an under-rated duel with another Aussie great, someone he shares his birthday with – Damien Fleming. The former Australia quick, who dismissed Tendulkar five times in 20 ODIs and twice in four Tests, had a rather unique experience when he was asked to talk about Sachin.
"He was quick to get into position but he was often late to play his shots so it was really hard to fool him," Fleming said on the documentary 'Bradman and Tendulkar – The story of two of cricket's giants' before he was interrupted by Siri – the AI interface – on his watch. Fleming then decided to have some fun, asking his iWatch a question teams and bowlers have tried to figure out their entire careers.
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"Siri, where do you bowl to Tendulkar? Didn't answer, did he? Even Siri doesn't know where to bowl to Tendulkar," Fleming quipped.
In fact, one of Fleming's dismissals of Tendulkar came during the India legend's famous Desert Storm innings. On April 22, 1998, chasing a revised target, India needed to knock off a particular target, which they did thanks to Tendulkar's sublime 143 and qualified for the final. Two days later in the final, which happened to be Tendulkar's 24th birthday, cracked another century – 134 – as India won the Coca Cola Trophy.
Even today, highlights of Tendulkar's towering sixes couple by an over-the-moon Tony Grieg perfectly sums up the atmosphere in Sharjah. The iconic Don Bradman had once said that 'cricket is at its best and most exciting when you've got a slow spin bowler bowling to a champion batsman. Then I feel you've always got incident, and that's exactly what happened when Tendulkar took strike against Warne.
"I remember on that 1998 tour... we were Tendulkar-centric at that stage. It was nuts. If you were trying to move a fielder, unless they actually looked at you, they could not hear you. When Warne would get the ball, it wasn't quite as loud as Tendulkar but it was loud. It was just two legends of the game going at each other," said Fleming.
