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Sporting an excuse
It?s highly unlikely that Sachin Tendulkar is faking an injury to tide over a lean patch, as many suspect. But then, sporting history is filled with the most outrageous excuses to justify failure.
As soon as the news of Sachin Tendulkar’s shoulder injury hit the airwaves, I got a phone call from a friend, an ardent cricket fan and conspiracy theorist. “It’s all a conspiracy,” he declared, predictably. “It’s because they booed him in Bombay. There’s no injury. This is some image consultant’s doing. He needs to let the Indian team lose matches and return at some point when no one’s questioning his place in the team.” I pointed out that Tendulkar had hit many lean patches over the last decade and a half; that someone of his stature would never fake an injury, or need to. “Rubbish!” he exclaimed. “Everyone’s faking injuries. Shoaib did it. Ganguly did it.” I pointed out this was all conjecture, and that since he was a person who thought all cricket matches were rigged but professional wrestling shows weren’t, his opinion was of no consequence.
At this point, if it isn’t clear enough, let me state for the record that I do not think Tendulkar is faking his injury, and am hoping desperately that he will get his shoulder fixed and return to his usual magnificent form soon and silence his critics yet again. Because if he doesn’t, some lame-brained selector might decide to drop him and that would be a sad day indeed.
Besides, if Tendulkar needed an excuse for bad form, he needn’t have gone through the complicated process of faking an injury. The annals of sports history are full of glittering examples of outrageous excuses used to justify failures in every possible sport — and an adoring public are often willing to believe anything their idols tell them. The BBC and The Observer both have lists of the world’s worst sporting excuses.
The most innovative was the Sri Lankan cricket team’s explanation of their loss to Pakistan in the 2001 ICC Champion’s Trophy — their clothes were too tight. “We had to add extensions to the trousers and the shirts looked more like tight-fitting women’s blouses,” said Sanath Jayasuriya. Then there was Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson’s range of excuses for his team’s losses (not enough penalty time, players couldn’t identify teammates because they were dressed in grey, too much rugby played on the same pitch, biased referees, too many international fixtures).
And there are some truly bizarre ones — Carol Gaudie, an Australian netball player, tested positive for testosterone in 2002 and claimed her drink was spiked at a nightclub. And Shane Warne, who claimed his mother had fed him Moduretic to make him look thinner on TV, a noble effort that got him a year-long ban. F1 legend Nigel Mansell once stopped on the last lap of the Canadian GP and lost his lead, because he shut down the ignition while waving to fans on the home stretch. His excuse? The car was too small.
The Athens Olympics were a particularly epic period for self-excusing heroes. The Finnish finished nowhere, for a variety of reasons — a javelin thrower was surprised at the size of the stadium, a 5,000 m runner was traumatised by an unfamiliar masseuse and a sailor had a malevolent bag stuck in her boat. The same Olympics saw award-winning excuses from a nation whose citizens are internationally renowned masters in the fine art of buck-passing — India. The hockey team complained of bad umpiring, Karnam Malleswari had a last-minute back pain problem, Anju Bobby George found the air in Greece polluted and nausea-inducing after the clean skies of her home nation, markswoman Anjali Bhagwat had stiff muscles, middle-distance runner K.M. Binu put the wrong spikes on and crack shot Suma Shirur cracked up because she was flabbergasted by the scale of the event she was participating in. I wonder what our nation’s weightlifters will say caused their positive drug tests in the current Commonwealth Games — I just hope they’re not too doped out to think of something. That said, at this point Tendulkar needs no excuses, because by and large the nation, Lata Mangeshkar downwards, is behind him loudly and enthusiastically and he has no shortage of shoulders to lean on. Every time he racks up an injury, a billion people feel his pain.
But take people in creative fields — a writer can’t blame an aching index finger for a terrible book and is left with unconvincing things like ‘It doesn’t matter whether my last novel sucked, because the novel is dead’. Actors can’t blame lactic acid accumulation in their facial muscles for wooden performances and have to take refuge in the weak ‘I couldn’t concentrate because I was busy killing endangered animals, calling press conferences, avoiding sting operations, dancing at criminals’ weddings’. No one feels any sympathy for doctors, lawyers, businessmen and teachers with nagging rotator cuff injuries. It’s so unfair.
On the other hand, the rest of us don’t have a billion people breathing down our necks, analysing every step, mimicking our voice and walk, bitching about the lack of our productivity and the lavishness of our product endorsements, predicting our downfall, doom and destruction all the time either.
Sachin might not be interested in retirement, but the rest of us are. In his retirement, that is. Which can’t be pleasant for him, to say the least. But even his harshest critic must recognise that if there’s anyone capable of coming back and stunning us all, it’s Tendulkar. And I’m sure not even the batsman padding up to take his place in the side wants to see an Indian cricket team sans Sachin just yet.
