Sachin Tendulkar was bestowed with a special honour on Thursday at Lord’s. A portrait of Tendulkar was unveiled in the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) Museum before play on the opening day of the England versus India third Test match at Lord’s. The portrait, by artist Stuart Pearson Wright, will remain in the MCC Museum until later this year when it will be relocated to the Pavilion. The Lord’s Portrait Programme has been running in its current form for three decades, but MCC has been collecting art and artefacts since the Victorian period, opening a dedicated museum in the 1950s, making it the oldest sporting museum in Europe.
Tendulkar also rang the iconic five-minute bell to begin day one of the Lord’s Test between India and England on Thursday. The five-match series, being played for the trophy named after Tendulkar and James Anderson, is level at 1-1.
During the unveiling, Sachin Tendulkar was engaged in a bit of mild banter by MCC’s Mark Nicholas. “You didn’t get on the Lord’s Honours Board. What happened? High-quality English bowling, I imagine,” Nicholas asked. The Lord’s Honours Board features players with centuries and five-wicket hauls at the ground.
“I thought that in 1998, when we played a memorial game, I got a hundred then. Glenn McGrath, Allan Donald, Srinath, Kumble, and McMillan… But one normally thinks about having your name on the Honours Board. Somehow it wasn’t meant to happen, but it did happen,” Tendulkar replied.
Tendulkar is one of the greatest batters ever to have played the game. In an international career that spanned 24 years from 1989 to 2013, Tendulkar scored 34,357 runs in Test matches, One-Day Internationals, and T20 Internationals for India. This total is over 6,000 more than the next highest batter – Kumar Sangakkara with 28,016.
The portrait is painted from a photograph taken by the artist in Tendulkar’s home in Mumbai 18 years ago. As the work progressed, so did Pearson Wright’s approach, eventually ending with oil on abraded aluminium. The abstract background illustrates Tendulkar’s timelessness, unrestricted by any era or specific location.
With agency inputs