Twenty20 isn’t a young man’s game - Tendulkar

After nearly two weeks of the IPL in which veterans like Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist have been at their best, Sachin Tendulkar has insisted that age has little relation to a player’s performance in Twenty20.

“I don’t know who says that it’s a young man’s game. Clearly, he doesn’t know much about cricket,” Tendulkar told the IPL’s official website. “It’s a cricketers’ game so it really doesn’t matter whether you are young or old. It is a cricketer’s match.”

Tendulkar, 36, has himself been in fine form, making 164 runs in four games with two half-centuries, but failed during Mumbai Indians’ three-run loss to Kings XI Punjab on Wednesday. Mumbai fell short though they were chasing a modest 120, but Tendulkar said it was not a case of complacency.

“We lost three early wickets and that put a lot of pressure on us. It wasn’t a flat deck to bat on, there was something happening,” he said. “I thought our bowlers did extremely well to restrict them to 120. We knew that it was going to be close. We needed couple of decent partnerships in between which would have taken us to our target. But that didn’t happen.”

He also said it was more difficult to bat under lights. “The conditions get tougher in the evening, later the ball does a bit. Also the nature of the wicket is such that the ball was not coming onto the bat. And if the ball starts doing that then it’s always going to be tough to put it away.”

Tendulkar said Mumbai was in control till around the 16th over of the chase but were unable to get the required big hits towards the end. The defeat leaves Mumbai in fourth place, with five points from five matches. Cricinfo