Sachin Tendulkar in conversation with Dinesh Karthik after the win (AP Photo)
Tendulkar was stranded on 96 not out in that match, four short of what could have been his 46th ODI century. Karthik’s recollection of the chase’s final moments varies slightly from what transpired in the match.
Sachin Tendulkar turns 51 today, and on the occasion, the great man’s former India teammate, Dinesh Karthik, was asked about his good and bad memories with Tendulkar. The RCB stumper revealed that denying the cricketing great his century in a match was the worst memory he has with the legend, and to this day, he gets a lot of flak for it.
In a video shared by the Royal Challengers Bengaluru social media channel, Karthik talks about meeting Tendulkar for the first time before chronicling the instance where he left Tendulkar stranded on 97 not out (96*).
“Well, I can give you good memory, bad memory. Good memory being the fact that the first time I met him, it was on top of a flyover. We were going in a bus en route to the airport and he joined in his car and just got into the bus midway. That’s the first time I ever seen the man in my life. So that is a good memory,” remembered Karthik.
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“Bad memory was 97, not out. We needed four runs to win and I hit a six. So, I ended up making sure that he didn’t get the hundred till today. I get a lot of grief for it and rightly so. Understandable,” he added.
The match Karthik is talking about was the 3rd ODI between India and Sri Lanka at Cuttack in 2009. Chasing 239 to win, Tendulkar and Karthik took India home with seven wickets in hand and 45 deliveries remaining. The duo put on an unbeaten stand of 74 runs for the fourth wicket.
Tendulkar was stranded on 96 not out in that match, four short of what could have been his 46th ODI century. Karthik’s recollection of the chase’s final moments varies slightly from what transpired in the match.
It was a pivotal moment in the match when Karthik, then a rookie in the team, hit spinner Suraj Randiv for a six, bringing down the equation to seven runs required to win. Tendulkar, at that point, needed nine runs to reach his century. In the next over, Tendulkar hit a boundary off Lasith Malinga and then took a single. Karthik then rotated the strike to hand back the strike to Tendulkar, with India needing two runs to win. However, the real reason why Tendulkar missed out on a hundred was Malinga, who bowled one full down the pads, and the delivery went for five wides, signaling the end of the game. India won the game, and Tendulkar remained stranded on 96.
This was the only occasion on which Tendulkar remained unbeaten in the 90s in his ODI career. He had gotten out 17 times in the 90s in ODIs.