West Indies Tour For Sachin Retirement

[sathya_1979]

Very good insight about Sachin's stay in the team by Dileep Premachandran on WSJ:

WSJ: There was a debate that he has overstayed his international career. What do you think?
Mr. Premachandran: The issue I have with this debate, people who are debating, like you and me have no concept of greatness because we are not great. We do not know what it is like to be in that position. These players know when they are on their way down, but they also find ways to compensate. In Tendulkar’s case, I think we shouldn’t judge him by the numbers of the last two years. It’s also been a team very much in transition. It lost Rahul, it lost VVS [Laxman.] It has now lost Sehwag and Gambhir maybe not forever, but they are not in the team now. It would have been a huge sea change if there was not one old head in the team to guide the younger players. So, I think in that sense he had a job to do and he has done that.
Transition is one of the hardest things to manage when you have a team that is aging. By and large, India has done it well. They have phased out guys almost series by series and brought in one or two new guys each time. That’s the best way to go about it because if four or five guys go at the same time, you just collapse in a heap, which is pretty much what happened to Australia after 2006.