Shaw’s 546-run innings gets him likened to Sachin

PRITHVI Shaw is 14. When he went to bed on Monday night, he was one of many millions of cricket-crazy Indian teenagers — albeit more nervous than most because on Tuesday he would captain the Mumbai under-16 team for the first time.

When he went to bed on Wednesday night he was the new Sachin Tendulkar, complete with 138 000 hits on Google and headlines such as “Prithvi Shaw: the prodigious run-machine” screaming for posterity in The Times of India.

His Wikipedia page, which did not exist before Wednesday, reported breathlessly:

“Prithvi Shaw [born 1999] is an Indian cricketer who plays for Middle Income Group [MIG] Cricket Club in Mumbai and is the captain of Rizvi Springfield High School and the Mumbai under-16 team.

“He is a right-handed batsman and right-arm off-spin bowler whose abilities as a cricketing prodigy have led to repeated comparisons with Sachin Tendulkar. Shaw is widely tipped to become a full India international.”

The site devoted another 322 words to charting his achievements under the headings, “early life”, “early career” and “national record”.

The latter is, of course, what the fuss is about.

On Tuesday, Shaw began an innings that would grow to 546 before he was dismissed on Wednesday.

It was the third-highest score yet made at any level of cricket.

In an India wondering where its next god would come from after Tendulkar retired last weekend, Shaw would do nicely.

Not that he has fallen out of the sky.

Along with two friends, Sarfaraz Khan and Arman Jaffer, Shaw, who is a year the others’ junior, first hit the headlines on June 17 last year,

when the Indian Express wrote about “Three boys and a cricketing dream”.

By then, Sarfaraz had scored 31 centuries and Jaffer 55. Shaw? A piddling 25.

Shaw’s mother died several years ago and his father relinquished his business to ensure his son had the best he could give him in his bid to make cricket his career.

The youngster, who is sponsored, has twice been to England to play cricket and

features in Beyond all boundaries: the definitive documentary on cricket in

India, which was released in February.

Tendulkar was 11 when he first touched a cricket bat in seriousness.

After five years, during which he also pulled off stupendous schoolboy feats, he was a test batsman.

But that was in another time, uncluttered by T20 cricket and in which one-day internationals had some context because not nearly as many of them were being played.

Ten years from now, will Shaw and his buddies have been paraded in too many T20 tournaments and prostituted on too many billboards advertising too many products and been lumped together with too many other superkids and melted into mediocrities?

And will the crowds chant “Prith-vi, Prith-vi”?

Or will their hearts and their memories still belong to Sachin?