Can't imagine Sachin without cricket, says Anjali Tendulkar

For most us, Sachin Tendulkar and cricket are synonymous. We can’t imagine him doing anything aside from playing the game. It seems neither can his family.

“I can imagine cricket without Sachin, but I can’t imagine Sachin without cricket,” his wife Anjali told Harsha Bhogle during the third day of her husband’s 200th and final Test. I don’t know what will take cricket’s place in his life.”

Anjali, a qualified doctor, put her career on hold to stay home and raise the couple’s two kids, Arjun and Sara. She said not only will they will have to get used to having Sachin home all the time, he has a knack for find faults, pointing out peeling paint here or a crack there.

“I am very worried about it,” she said.

From the very start, Anjali was aware that cricket came first for her husband: “He belongs to the country, to Mumbai and then to us,” she said.

She revealed that he never really switched off from the game even when they were away on holiday in London. He would watch what he ate, go to the gym or practice with Arjun, with one eye on his next series.

That’s one of the reasons she could not put into words how his retirement has affected him or the family.

“Once the decision [to retire] was taken, to process it took a lot out of us,” she said. The family has been overwhelmed by the reaction to his announcement though, and Anjali believes Sachin himself has handled the swirl of emotions very well.

Then again, Sachin is not someone who wers his heart on his sleeve, so it is not easy to know what he is thinking or feeling.

“Sachin is very good at hiding his emotions. He has never shown us if he is tense about a big match or whether he has been upset by what someone said,” she said.

One thing Sachin did make clear though, was that he wanted his mother to be there at the Wankhede for his final Test. She had never seen her son play in person before, and he was determined that she would do so this time, to point where he personally supervised the installation of a ramp for her wheelchair and found the perfect spot for her to sit and watch.

The decision to retire was actually a simple one. “He has always said the minute he feels he can’t give 100 percent and can’t do it anymore, that will be the time he will take the decision,” Anjali said. “One day he just told me I think the time is right for me to retire.”

She responded by telling him not to feel guilty about it and if that was his choice, then he had the family’s support. By then the BCCI had already announced the West Indies series, which created the possibility of Sachin playing his last match on his home ground and scripting a perfect ending.

Anjali also revealed that Sachin is not the single-minded cricket machine that everyone imagines he is. “There is a lot that goes on in his mind,” she said. “Maybe one day he will tell everyone.”