One of the most impressive and memorable performances from the former Pakistani speedster Shoaib Akhtar arrived in 1999, a couple of years after his Test debut.
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It was the first match of the Asian Cup Championship between hosts India and Pakistan at an absolutely jam-packed Eden Gardens in Kolkata during the month of February.
Having bundled up Pakistan at the score of 185, India seemed to be in a decent enough position to take a first innings lead, after opener Sadagoppan Ramesh smashed a half-century (79).
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Shoaib Akhtar had just cleaned up Rahul Dravid’s stumps after the latter along with Ramesh had stitched together a half-century stand for the fourth wicket.
However, and as the veteran Indian commentator Harsha Bhogle once famously said, “Eruption of joy at the fall of an Indian wicket can only mean one thing”, it was now time for the star Indian batter Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar to take the centre stage with the crowd becoming all the more deafening.
1999-incident involving Sachin Tendulkar which Shoaib Akhtar believes made him a star
With the crowd up on their feet to welcome their mega icon, Akhar stated that Tendulkar took forever to face the first delivery, and he had to turn back twice to his run-up as the former was not ready.
However, a determined Akhtar was anxious to get two greats of the game dismissed off successive deliveries. He quickly recollected his skipper Wasim Akram’s advice to bowl at Tendulkar in line with the stumps, while making the ball reverse swing from outside the off-stump.
As fate would have it, Akhtar executed a perfect delivery which uprooted Tendulkar’s middle stump, and propel the Eden Gardens into an eerie, pin-drop silence.
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Later, the ‘Rawalpindi Express’ would disclose during an interview that he let Sachin know that had it not been for that delivery which got him Out, he would not have become a star that he is today.
“He had a high back-lift, the ball swung back in a mile. My reaction was such that I wasn’t surprised. After Allah, probably Sachin has made me a star. I told him that if I hadn’t got you out, I wouldn’t be a star. There was pindrop silence in the crowd, we could only hear our team-mates,” remarked Shoaib Akhtar.
