Sachin won’t admit it but he was scared of Shoaib Akhtar, claims Shahid Afridi
Former Pakistan skipper Shahid Afridi has stood with the controversial statement he made back in 2011 and has claimed that he could sense that Sachin Tendulkar, on several occasions, was scared of facing Shoaib Akhtar. Afridi also claimed that Sachin was scared of Ajmal during the 2011 World Cup.
Through the course of his 24-year-long international career, Sachin Tendulkar came up against a platoon of world-class fast bowlers, ranging from Wasim Akram to Dale Steyn, but one of the Master Blaster’s most notable rivals was Pakistan’s Shoaib Akhtar. Akhtar, who was, at the time of his debut, the fastest bowler in the world, played a total of 10 Test matches against India between 1998 and 2007 and amongst those ten, many, if not all, matches featured a stand-out face-off between the Rawalpindi Express and the Little Master.
Their rivalry is, till date, widely regarded as one of the best one-to-one battles in the history of cricket but despite Sachin evidently coming on top on a vast majority of the duo’s battles, former Pakistan skipper Shahid Afridi has now claimed that the Little Master was visibly scared of facing Akhtar’s bowling. In a chat with Pakistani journalist Zainab Abbas, Afridi has claimed that there were some spells of Akhtar that shook Sachin but stated that the admission - of being scared to face Akhtar - will never come from Sachin himself.
“Dekhiye Sachin Tendulkar aapne muh se toh nahi kahega ki main dar raha hu. (Sachin obviously won’t say it himself that he was scared). There were some spells from Shoaib Akhtar in which not only Sachin but some of the world’s best also got shaken up,” Afridi told Zainab Abbas, reported Times Now.
“When you are fielding at mid-off or covers, you can see it. You can sense the body language of a player. You can easily understand that a batsman is under pressure, he is not at his usual best. I’m not saying that Shoaib has scared Tendulkar always but there have been some spells from Shoaib that have pushed some of the world’s best including Tendulkar on to the backfoot.”
Afridi, who captained the Pakistan side in the 2011 World Cup in which he was the joint-highest wicket-taker, also claimed that Saeed Ajmal was another bowler who Sachin was scared of, during the World Cup. Incidentally, both Sachin and Ajmal were at the forefront of controversy in the semi-final encounter between India and Pakistan, where the former was saved by a DRS call that has since invoked plenty of controversies.
“During the World Cup, he also looked scared of (young spinner) Saeed Ajmal. It’s not a big deal, players do feel the pressure at times and it becomes difficult.”
This is not the first time, however, that Afridi is accusing Sachin of being scared of Akhtar’s bowling, as in his book, titled ‘'Controversially Yours', that was released in 2011, the all-rounder had said, “He (Tendulkar) was scared of Shoaib. I have seen it myself. I was fielding at square leg and saw his legs trembling when Shoaib came on to bowl.”
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