Not wanting to draw the limelight away from teammates, who were being besieged for photographs and autographs, Sachin Tendulkar sat at a short distance from gate 12, the boarding point for Qantas flight 422 from Melbourne to here on Saturday.
With Sachin were wife Anjali, daughter Sara, son Arjun and mother-in-law Annabel. Shadowing them were two armed federal police officers.
[In what was a mystery, Annabel’s boarding card showed her name as ‘Annabel Tendulkar’ instead of Mehta! “See, they’ve even changed my name,” she toldThe Telegraph, laughing.]
It didn’t, however, take long for word to get around that Sachin too was there in person. With fans moving towards where he and his family were seated, Sachin himself came to the gate 12 ‘hold’.
For the next 10-odd minutes, chaos reigned as everybody wanted a piece of Sachin. To his credit, he kept obliging, showing no signs of possibly getting a bit irritated.
Predictably, many hoped Sachin would soon get his 100th International hundred. One such well-wisher was Soundari Raj, the managing director of an educational body in the Gulf.
Sachin’s response to her “God bless and I hope you get that hundred” was a simple “God willing, I’ll get it.”
The earliest that it can happen is at the SCG, venue for the second Test (and its 100th), from Tuesday. Sachin’s average at the SCG is, well, a staggering 221.33.
Stumped by the God-like treatment meted out to Sachin and his teammates were the van Dijkes from Rotterdam. “You guys are very famous it seems... Back in Holland, we only know football stars,” Jacqueline van Dijke told Wriddhiman Saha, who happened to be in front of her (with wife Romi) in the queue at the boarding gate.
Husband Hans and daughter Waaijan were as bemused as Jacqueline.
There was much less commotion on board the 90-minute flight as Sachin and his family were seated at the front of the Boeing 767’s economy section, away from thejanata.
On the flight, captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni was a couple of rows behind Sachin and, as always, he didn’t mind having been ‘upstaged’.
Not that Dhoni goes unnoticed. Far from it. In fact, on the flight, one Naveen Gundavaram, a Seattle-based software engineer, thanked him for “winning the World Cup.”
Public memory isn’t that short always.
Cricket-wise, the year ended with the battering at the MCG. The highpoint, however, was regaining the most cherished trophy.
That achievement, after 28 years, just can’t be taken away.
