Sanju Samson and Sachin Tendulkar Collecting the Player of the Tournament award after Sunday’s T20 World Cup win, an emotional Sanju Samson recalled how broken he felt, his dreams dashed after a miserable run of form. Fortunately for Samson, help was just a call away.Samson became the latest in a long line of Indian batsmen to seek help from the god of cricket, Sachin Tendulkar. Like the others, he was not disappointed.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SIGN UP NOW!“When I was sitting out in Australia (during the T20Is in October)… I wasn’t playing any game, I was thinking about what kind of mindset is required,” Samson said, “I approached ‘Sir’ and had long conversations with him.”Samson spoke from the heart about the value of Sachin’s leadership – “the clarity, the game preparation, the awareness and sense of the game”. He revealed: “Even the night before the final, Sir called me to see how I was feeling.”
Sanju Samson begins his T20 World Cup journey and wins the title
There is a reason why Sunil Gavaskar, himself once a mentor to Tendulkar, referred to Sachin as “the university of batting”. Former India head coach and former South African batsman Gary Kirsten also referred to Tendulkar in similar terms.Despite spending more than a decade away from international cricket, Tendulkar still follows the games closely and has a keen eye for batting technique. The master doesn’t make these observations public, but if a player approaches him, he’s always known to be ready to help.“Tendulkar brings honesty to the table and keeps things simple”Cast your mind back to India’s 2011 World Cup when Yuvraj Singh endured a terrible time with the bat a year before the event. Questions swirled about whether he should even make the team. During the camp, when the left-hander was struggling with a slump in form and fitness, Tendulkar told him, “You will matter when it matters most.” Yuvraj became player of the tournament.In 2014, Virat Kohli said he was a mental wreck after he managed to score just 134 runs in 10 innings on his first England tour when he was traumatized outside the off-stump by pacer James Anderson. On his return, Kohli sent an SOS to Tendulkar and the two worked on the inner nets at the Bandra Kurla complex for a few days.Kohli later said that their talks were not just about technical adjustments or batting. “It was about how he coped with times like that. … One thing he told me was, ‘You should always do what you’re comfortable with.’ If you don’t feel like hitting the nets before the match, don’t hit the nets. You should never do it just because other people are burning half an hour in the nets,” Kohli mentioned during an interview with The Cricket Monthly.Kohli then smashed four hundreds in the 2014-2015 Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia.Ahead of the 2025 England tour, newly crowned Test captain Shubman Gill also admitted that he sought Tendulkar’s advice on how to succeed in English conditions.His advice to Gill to defend straight and score runs saw him score 754 runs in the five-match series.“The best thing about ‘The Master’ is that he knows what conditions he is talking about. He makes the people who approach him understand how to play in certain conditions, respect them and do what works for them,” says Atul Ranade, Tendulkar’s childhood friend and currently coach of the Ranji team in Mumbai.Modern day cricketers have plenty of coaches to turn to. So why do they keep turning to Tendulkar for advice? “What it brings to the table is honesty,” explained Ranade, “and it’s going to be as simple as possible so that people can easily understand it.”Out-of-favour batsman Prithvi Shaw, who scored a Test hundred on his debut against the West Indies in October 2018, was not only given technical tips while training at the Mumbai Cricket Association ground, but was also told to mend his ways. “Waapas track pe aaja (Better get back on track),” Tendulkar reportedly told the captain of India’s U-19 team that won the World Cup in New Zealand in early 2018.“He’s always there for them; he always has time to get back into the game. He’s always ready to help in any way,” Ranade said.Ranade recalled when Sachin and Ranade played badminton in 2014 just a few months after the batsman’s retirement. “He (Tendulkar) told us, ‘Don’t disturb me until one phone call comes’. Confused, we asked, ‘Who will call?’“Rohit will call,” Ranade replied. Rohit Sharma has just started opening for India in ODIs and as expected, his call has come. Tendulkar stopped the game to talk to him for almost half an hour.Ranade said Tendulkar also played a major role in getting Sharma to Mumbai Indians from Deccan Chargers in 2011. Sharma went on to captain the team for five IPL championships.
