Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

WHAT GIGGS AND TENDULKAR HAVE IN COMMON

Sportsmen are not supposed to get better at the end of their careers, but nobody told Ryan Giggs and Sachin Tendulkar. Tim de Lisle pinpoints their virtues ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2011

In sport, old age starts in the mid-30s. This is when the eyes slow, the waistline thickens, the knees rebel against all that twisting and turning, and the hotels and airports begin to pall. In the major outdoor sports, only a golfer or a goalie can expect to stay at the top of his game through his 30s. But somehow two 37-year-olds are among today’s leading sportsmen, trading not on reputation but on recent form. Ryan Giggs, recently voted Manchester United’s greatest player of all ahead of George Best, has again been one of the most influential figures in club football, steering United back to the top of the Premiership. Sachin Tendulkar, already installed as one of cricket’s all-time greats, was the best batsman of 2010, keeping India at the top of the Test rankings with a string of centuries. Both men were born in 1973, and have stayed at the top for 20 years while careers in general have been getting shorter. How have they done it?

Fitness:

Keeping fit is the first duty of a sportsman. A winger like Giggs would normally be creaking at 30, fading at 32, strolling about in a lower division at 34, and spouting platitudes in a commentary box at 36. Giggs has bucked the trend by devoting his afternoons to an activity many footballers might sneer at: yoga.

Batting is less strenuous than football, so Tendulkar is less unusual—101 men have played Test cricket in their 40s, but their ranks have thinned as the international programme has sprawled. The last was Alec Stewart in 2003, and he only started at 26. Tendulkar was a Test regular at 16, so he is that rare bird, the child star with staying power. Where Giggs is slim and wiry, Tendulkar is 5ft 5in and chunky. A shoulder injury and some poor form nearly finished him in 2006, but he fought back by working ferociously in the gym and the nets. Making a Test century, as he has done far more times than anyone else, means batting for four to six hours in the heat of the day. He regroups with breathing exercises and meditation. Open mind, healthy body.

Stickability: 

The one-club man is an endangered species, hunted almost to extinction by the plutocrats who have turned sport into a form of luxury shopping. But Ryan Giggs hasn’t changed clubs since 1987, when, as a 14-year-old, he shrewdly left Man City for Man United. With his open mind, he might have made a better fist of playing abroad than most British footballers, but he has stayed firmly put.

The leading cricketers barely play for their clubs these days, but even so, as Kevin Pietersen of England has shown, they can still walk out on them. Tendulkar has played for Mumbai since 1988, and when the Indian Premier League arrived, bearing unprecedented gifts, he simply joined Mumbai Indians.
 
Vision: 

Wingers don’t always have this, as Theo Walcott of Arsenal has been known to demonstrate. All they need is pace, and the ability to make one decision—cross the ball or pull it back. Giggs can do that in his sleep, but when he moves into central midfield, it’s as if he has a sat-nav in his head, showing where Rooney and Berbatov are at any given moment. Tendulkar, when he opens the batting for India in a one-day game, has a similar device to tell him where the fielders are.

Stamina: 

Bobby Charlton’s record of 759 games for Manchester United stood for 35 years, but Giggs surpassed it the night he won his second Champions League medal, in 2008, and by January 2011 he had played another hundred times. Behind the statistics lie decades of dedication and application, of rising to the big occasion and not sinking to the small one. In cricket, it was long thought that 100 Tests or a little more was the limit; they do last five days, after all. Then one bloody-minded Australian, Allan Border, battled his way to 156 Tests, and another, Steve Waugh, managed 168. Tendulkar, without being bloody-minded at all, has played 177 Tests. Going into this year’s World Cup, he also shared the world record for one-day-international caps—a mind-boggling 444. He has far more miles on the clock than any other cricketer of any era.

Humility: 

Both men play for teams with an arrogant streak. If there were a competition to find the world’s most supported sports team, the final would probably be between Manchester United and the Indian cricketers. The big names in both teams are worshipped like gods and paid like bankers. No player has ever held this status for as long as Giggs and Tendulkar, yet they have remained humble. Giggs doesn’t mind being substituted or coming on as a sub. Tendulkar, unlike some Indian batsmen, takes trouble with his fielding, cricket’s third and least egotistical dimension. He has kept up his sideline as a bowler, purveying modest little allsorts when the team needs them. And neither man minds whether he is captain or not: they just slot in as the senior pro, an almost equally vital but far less visible role.

Simplicity: 

Tendulkar’s technique is compact and classical: he observes the basics that cricket coaches drum into children—pick up the length, step forward or back, keep your head still—while adding flourishes of his own, such as the whip past mid-on that is more like a tennis shot, a cross-court topspin forehand. Giggs too respects the eternal verities: keep possession, track back, find space, be in a position to be passed to. The younger men he plays against, from Arsenal to Barcelona, play sideways, like quicksilver crabs. Giggs is forever looking to slip the ball forwards. What sounds like a no-brainer has become a USP.
 
Appetite: 

Every sporting career begins with a child who just loves kicking or hitting a ball. Giggs and Tendulkar are elder statesmen now, but you can still see that child in them. They come to each game fresh, as if unaware that they have played hundreds of them. They still want to win, although they can hardly move for medals. And they take pleasure in their craft—timing a drive, weighting a pass, whipping up some magic.

Selectivity: 

Sportsmen who play for both club and country struggle to please both masters: the 2010 football World Cup was a parade of club superstars failing to reproduce their club form, from Rooney to Torres. Giggs, like Paul Scholes, worked out that he couldn’t satisfy his country’s demands as well as Alex Ferguson’s. He quit international football in 2007, after only 64 games for Wales. Tendulkar has played just one Twenty20 match for India, and hasn’t appeared in county cricket since a stint with Yorkshire in 1992.

Dignity: 

Most of us hope to grow old with dignity. Giggs and Tendulkar both started showing dignity before they grew old: no scandals, no shenanigans, no sex texts. In a petulant age, they show grace under pressure. Neither has much to say, which can be dull for fans but makes sense for them and their teams: their skills do the talking. In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the meaning of life was 42. In football and cricket at the moment, it seems to be 37. 

Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life magazine and the and the author of "Young Wisden: A New Fan's Guide to Cricket" . Picture Credit: gordonflood.com, Flying Cloud (both via Flickr)