Book review: Read this book for D’Souza’s stabs at the hype around Tendulkar’s final three days as a Test cricketer

We know why, of course. After all, Sachin Tendulkar didn’t bid goodbye to cricket just every day. And without exception, we all wanted in. Like many of us, Dilip D’Souza — a writer with a keen understanding of the meaning of sport and equipped with a fiercely observant eye — was game to beg, borrow or steal his way in. He pleaded for a media accreditation pass, only to be laughed off by the BCCI, then pushed a former Test cricketer without success for a spare ticket and finally shoved hopelessly in the shady bowels of the black market.

But unlike many of us, D’Souza was supplied with a last-minute pass-key to the Wankhede (thanks to a benevolent friend), only to find himself on the worst seat in the house and privy to a show that was less a match and more an obnoxious tamasha; one that is quite aptly described in his latest book, The Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

“It turned into one great overwhelming all-consuming outpouring of emotion and affection and nostalgia for the man, no matter what happened in the game itself,” he writes in this brutally honest account of his neighbour’s (the two live on the same street in Bandra, and have since become acquaintances) last tryst with a game he served for 25 years.

D’Souza smacks a big creamy dollop of perspective when he says: “Because this Test is unabashedly more of a spectacle than a match. Because the cuts and thrusts of a keenly-contested Test are not just absent in this match, it’s as if nobody even wants them in the first place.”

Unfortunately, he ends up giving the ‘spectacle’ far more importance than needed by wading neck-deep into a ball-by-ball analysis of the cricket on display.

Now, D’Souza will be the first to accept that he isn’t a follower of the modern game or its superstars (the fact that he mistakes Pragyan Ojha, the Man of the Match in the game, for a ‘Pravin’ Ojha should tell you that). Neither is he, as he makes it a point to mention in the book, a cricket writer by profession. So when he forays into the nuances with lengthy discourses on the ‘Laraesque batting style’ of Darren Bravo or the ‘lack of aura’ of the current bunch of Caribbean cricketers, you know you’ve read-those, heard-those or seen-those predictable explanations before.

It seems more tedious than it really is because the West Indies batted twice in this Test, forcing D’Souza to take lengthy excursions into each of those 20 innings, in great detail. And when he comes down to the only innings of importance, the writer leaves us short-changed as Tendulkar hurriedly goes from his overnight score of 38 not out to dismissed on 74 in all of two pages!

Still, The Final Test is a must-read, especially for D’Souza’s delicious digressions from the sport. Read it for his take on the madness of the Indian media and the misplaced passion of the new-age Indian cricket fan, for the impartial grieving of the Sachin mania and his delightful painting of the partial Tendulkar supporter at the venue and for his observations on why cricket has sold its soul in a way that no other sport worth its traditions ever would and how the game became a religion and burdened one man with the responsibility of being God.

Read this book for D’Souza’s stabs at the hype that surrounded the circus and arbitrary advertisements that laced the Wankhede during Tendulkar’s final three days as a Test cricketer. In short, read it for everything beyond the boundary ropes, because the tamasha was never about what was trapped within it in the first place.