September 18 2008

The statement came out from Sachin Tendulkar that India’s rivalry with Australia has become more intense now. As in the past Pakistan was the big rival to India and there is a long history about that. He gave that statement on Thursday. Next month Australia is visiting India for four-Test match series. This series will start on October 9 in Bangalore.

The big competition is expected in that series. Tendulkar said that it would be a fiercely competitive series between the two top teams from the world. These two teams had encountered many times in recent times to prove their superiority over each other. He further said that both teams are now the bigger competitors to each other.

When we look in the past, we see that from 2001 till now all of the matches played between these two teams have been very close to each other. All of these matches were truly fighting matches. In the recent past, we see that in 2007-2008 match series which is taken as ill-tempered series, India lost the first two Test matches.

However, in the third Test match played in Perth cricket ground, India made a prized victory over home team. Tendulkar said that we are able to surprise the Australian team. Australian public likes that kind of thrilling matches full of competition and high standards of play. The audience always expects challenging and competitive matches.

He said that the number of fans has been increased to many times as they were 15 years ago. This is all because of the competitiveness.
Sachin Tendulkar is renowned as a little master. He is now at the age of 35. He is now very close to the Brian Lara’s record of most runs ever scored in a Test career. He is just 76 runs short to meet Lara’s record of 11,953 runs. But he said that records are not important to him; he doesn’t ever give priority to them.

He never played for records and never though about them very much. He also enjoys playing cricket just that’s all. He said that if any player has a strong focus on his performance, records automatically piles up.