'Till today, I get a lot of grief for it' - Dinesh Karthik recalls when he denied Sachin Tendulkar a century

Indian crickets’s great Sachin Tendulkar celebrated his 51^st birthday on April 24, 2024 and wishes poured in from every corner. On the eve of Master Blaster's birthday, Indian cricketer Dinesh Karthik reminisced about an incident where he denied the legend a century. 

Karthik recalled the memories from the third T20I against Sri Lanka at Cuttack in 2009. India were chasing a target of 239. Tendulkar and Karthik paired up for an unbeaten 74 runs for the fourth wicket and finished the game with 7.3 overs to spare. The wicketkeeper-batter recalled the moment he hit a boundary as Tendulkar was in the nineties. 

"Well, I can give you good memory, bad memory. Good memory being the fact that the first time I met him, it was on top of a flyover. We were going in a bus en route to the airport and he joined in his car and just got into the bus midway. That's the first time I ever seen the man in my life. So that is a good memory," Karthik said in a video posted by RCB.

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"Bad memory was 97, not out. We needed four runs to win and I hit a six. So, I ended up making sure that he didn't get the hundred. Till today, I get a lot of grief for it and rightly so. Understandable," he added.

Sachin was someone that I looked up to as a young kid: Faf du Plessis

Royal Challengers Bengaluru captai, Faf du Plessis also has rubbed shoulders with greats of cricket. While the Indian Premier League provides such opportunities, du Plessis has never shared the dressing room with Sachin. However, he has recalled the first meeting with the legend and asserted that the 51-year-old is someone he had always looked up to.

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"I remember the first memory playing for South Africa against India was just, wow. When you walk in, you saw Sachin batting there for the first time because it was someone that I looked up to as a young kid and always admired his consistency. I think that for me was the biggest thing that always stood out. But seeing him for the first time and for such a small guy to have such a huge presence was a thing that stood out for me that first time I played against him," he added.