Sachin at the Wankhede
One billion people held their breath. Then the stadium exploded.
April 2, 2011. India versus Sri Lanka, World Cup Final. The Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. I wasn’t there — nobody I knew was there, the tickets had evaporated into that mysterious economy of cricket connections and corporate hospitality. But I was in Mumbai, in a flat in Bandra with seventeen people and one television.
The Wait
India had been chasing this for twenty-eight years. Since Kapil Dev lifted the trophy at Lord’s in 1983, the country had grown up, liberalized its economy, launched satellites, built an IT industry, and still hadn’t won another World Cup. Cricket doesn’t care about your GDP growth.
And this was Sachin’s last chance. Everyone knew it. He was thirty-seven, had played six World Cups, scored more runs than anyone in the history of the tournament, and had never won it. The cruelty of team sport is that individual greatness guarantees nothing.
The Moment
When Dhoni hit that six — that absurd, impossible, perfect six over long-on — the sound in the flat was not cheering. It was closer to a primal scream. Seventeen people producing a sound that had been building for decades.
I looked out the window. Every building in Bandra was erupting. Firecrackers, car horns, people running into the streets. The city was vibrating at a frequency I had never felt before.
And somewhere in the Wankhede, Sachin’s teammates lifted him onto their shoulders. The man who had carried Indian cricket for twenty-two years was, for once, being carried.
Virat Kohli said it best: “Sachin has carried the weight of the nation for twenty-one years. It was time we carried him.”
What It Meant
Sport is supposed to be trivial. Grown men hitting a ball with a stick. But that night, in that city, for those people — it was not trivial. It was the intersection of personal and collective identity, the moment when a billion individual stories converged into one.
I still can’t watch the highlights without my eyes getting wet. I suspect I never will.