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The idea of Virat Kohli masks, reportedly 70,000 of them, got nixed by the Indian board. Eden holds a little less but with these things, the Cricket Association of Bengal possibly thought it best to err on the side of caution. What if someone wants a Kohli face in front and back? Anyway, Eden could be filled three times its 67,000 capacity and still the demand-supply equation would be skewed towards the former.
But even if that won’t happen, it will still be Kohli’s birthday on Sunday. And what better way to mark it than by scaling Mount 49 and join Sachin Tendulkar as the only other batter to have got there? It nearly happened in Dharamsala and Mumbai but will Kohli be third time lucky here? At a venue where in 2009 he had scored 184 off 121 balls playing for Mohun Bagan in a winning cause in the final of a CAB tournament,.
Numbers don’t matter in sport, till they do. Wimbledon has a clip on X of Serena Williams looking exasperated, rolling her eyes and saying, “You know the answer to that,” and the interlocuter saying, “I tried,” to which Williams snorts and laughter breaks out in the press room. The question was on her getting to Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam titles. Having won the 2017 Australian Open when she was two months pregnant, Williams played four Grand Slams finals but couldn’t get there before retiring.
Ahead of his 24th Grand Slam title, Novak Djokovic referred to the 2021 US Open final. “I was maybe overwhelmed with the occasion and the opportunity and I underperformed,” he said, referring to the straight-set defeat to Daniil Medvedev which cost him the chance to go past Roger Federer’s feat of 20 Grand Slam titles.
Pele, who scored goals for Brazil and Santos since he was a teenager, has spoken about how approaching the figure of 1000 goals “made me very nervous” in ‘My Life And The Beautiful Game’, one of his autobiographies. (FIFA doesn’t agree with the number but Brazil do, its football federation CBF adding a caveat that Neymar Jr beating Pele record of 77 international goals made him the country’s all-time record scorer against national teams.)
Pele says he didn’t score in two games to stay on 996. Going into the game against Bahia on 999, Pele says he had a “sudden cold feeling that I was doomed to go for years without scoring another goal.” Sachin Tendulkar’s struggles on getting to his 100th international century too are well documented. “Wherever I went, the restaurant, room service, everyone was talking about the 100th hundred. Nobody talked about my 99 hundreds. It became mentally tough for me,” he had said after getting to the landmark in Mirpur in March 2012.
Approaching 49 ODI tons, Kohli is not looking overwrought. “Virat’s been really relaxed and you can see it in his performances,” said India coach Rahul Dravid on Saturday. “And no, I don’t really think he’s thinking too much about 49 and 50, and probably certainly not about his birthday, getting a year older. I think he’s been really focussed on winning the tournament and playing some good cricket for us. I think he’s doing that really well.”
Cricket is a team game but batting and bowling are individual things, said Bangladesh’s Mehidy Hasan Miraz after losing to Pakistan here on Tuesday. Hence, the importance of individual milestones. Think 29 Test centuries, 365 not out by Gary Sobers in 1958, Brian Lara bettering it with 375 36 years later and getting to 400 not out in 2004, Lara’s unbeaten 501 against Durham or Kapil Dev’s 434 Test wickets. Not all these numbers stand but they have been landmarks generations have aspired to break.
Not getting to 24 did not diminish Williams’ aura. “I would like nothing more than Serena to tie Margaret Court at 24 or even surpass her,” two-time Grand Slam winner Tracy Austin told The Insider in 2022. “But I think even without those numbers, Serena’s gonna be thought of as the best of all time. I feel like so often the press is talking about 24. Who cares?”.
Only the second person in the history of cricket to get past 75 international hundreds after Tendulkar, Kohli too does not need any more numbers to validate a stellar career.
Pele, Tendulkar and Williams have spoken on the media hype around milestones. Guilty as charged. When Pele got his 1000th goal, with a penalty at Maracana, it coincided with the second landing on the moon. The front page of next day’s papers in Brazil gave equal importance to both, he has said.
So, no pressure Virat but Eden wouldn’t mind a 49th on Sunday.
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