1. His footwork
Anyone who has played cricket and remembers going back to the nets after a long break will recall how every thing is okay except the most crucial one, the feet dont move right.
The same happens as a batsmen starts declining.
Sachin amongst his many qualities that made him, please dont argue since it is my opinion and I am not forcing it on others, the greatest batsman of his era, was his precise footwork. This has gone. Even today, when he edged to slip, his backfoot was moving back a bit towards the leg side. The same happened two games ago. His feet are not moving well spontaneoulsy. He makes an exaggerated conscious movement when he plays forward in defense. He tries to play "off the backfoot" in defense but doesnt move back enough or across and gets bowled and then he bends low down in an exaggerated movement which gives the impression as if the ball kept so wickedly low which it hadnt. He plays a drive on the up off the front foot without getting his left foot across and thereby drags the ball onto the stumps of an inside edge. Same happens at times with a short pitched ball that he forces off the backfoot to covers without moving across enough, the ball takes the inside edge and recochettes on to the stumps or takes the outside edge as he follows it, as if mesmerised, and plays it to the waitng slips. Again if you do not get behind the ball, it becomes more difficult to LEAVE IT ALONE !!
Let this not give the impression that his game has gone to pieces. No. Far from it. But if you watch him closely and if you have watched him over the years, you will find that these things are happening with increasing frequency.
His footwork is getting bad !
2. His strokes:
If you look back at Sachin of the mid nineties, what do you remember ?
Booming cover drives and extracover drives, back foot punches right out of the text book, square cuts that burnt the grass as they screached to the boundry (remember the grass), straight drives that hit the railings even as the bowler was completing his follow through, on drives from mid wicket to long on and the best of them off leg spinners against the spin, moving out to within a centoimeter of the ball and driving all along the carpet or hoisting it conciously over the long on boundry, pulls from wide mid on to forward of square which hit the ground straight from the bat (as they do now from Rahul) and flicks which he made with such precision that you never had any doubt that he knew exactly which hoarding on the boundary he was aiming for.
What do we see now?
Powerful slashes to covers, square cuts that go whistling in the air (remember the air) between gully and point or above the slips, slashes over point and even thirdman, sometimes for six, paddle shots to long leg placed to perfection, pulls that go tantalisingly over the short midwickets hands (a short midwicket is mandatory for Sachin), slightly cross batted hits over wide mid on, and now, believe it or not, a reverse sweep that nearly went for six. Sachin has changed his strokes from pure cricketing ones which could have adorned the MCC coaching book or Viv Richards shelf, to those no schoolboy will be taught by any coach(since the coach wont be able to play them himself) and which will thrill the uninitiated hoardes in the crowds but will make the student of the game yearn for the 16 year old Sachin carving Aussies to all parts of the ground.
Sachin has exchanged his magical strokes for innovative shots which he, being the skilled craftsman that he has been for 16 years is still able to pull off on his day.
3. His temprament :
India has produced two great batsmen, both from Bombay. Gavaskar and Tendulkar. Both great masters and both so different in every respect. Gavaskar was all studied orthodoxy a man who was thinking every nano second that the cricket bat was in his hands and Tendulkar who was all spontaneity and natural strokeplay. He played as if the ball and he were part of a preplanned , pre-programmed pantomime. The bowler bowled and he moved as if no thought went into it as to , "this is what I should do". No. It was as if the body decided for itself and nothing else needed to be done.
Then in the early eighties, about 12-14 years after his fantastic debut in the Carrebean, Gavaskar tried to play a different game. He started playing "freely" so to say. He even hit a run a ball(under a run a ball) century, his only one I think in ODI's!! He tried hitting the first ball of a test match out of the ground !! Something had happened to Gavaskar, he had changed.
About as many years after his debut in Pakistan and then Austarlia, sachin also changed but in exactly the opposit way. He started thinking. Every ball, every fraction of a second from the bowlers hands till it came to him, he seemed to think as to what he should be doing. This was not THE Tendulkar we knew. He had lost his spontaneity. He was playing synthetic cricket. He was MAKING his body do what he thought he should be doing. And this changed him. I have always wondered whether this change was brought about by physical reasons, his many injuries that may have reduced what he coud get his body to do or was it the pressure of expectations, of a nation of himself and of his legacy.
But Sachin has changed and since the result has not been uniformly a hit (barring the miracles like the cover-drive-less double hundred in Australia a year and a half ago), I think it has affected him personally and he is thinking even more about what he should and should not be doing. With the result he has become a prisoner of his thinking and his temprament ahs taken a big hit as has his mental strength. I think Sachin on the crease, today, is probably the most tense cricketer the world has ever had. This can only have negative impact on his game.
For these reasons, I do not think we will see the best of Sachin again. I do hope and pray that I am proved wrong but I doubt it. Oh yes he will score runs. He will get 45 plus ODI centuries and 40 plus test hundreds. But he will not reach even the heights he had reached before. I also feel he had YET to play his best when his game started declining. This seems a contradiction in terms, so let ,me explain.
I think sachin was capable of and should have given the world greater exhibition of batsmanship which he could have , had he not first fallen prey to the innovative strokeplay of the limited over game which changed his style and then when this affected his performance in test matches he made things worse by not going back to his old game but by trying to think himself out of a poor run.
He is a genius so he could still score runs but he failed to touch his peak.
). Occasionally he plays an innings of complete and utter dominance, but these are increasingly few. Most of his centuries (especially Test centuries) in recent times have been hard-fought innings rather than dominant ones.
Hooray, SJS saves me the trouble of explaining my position. 
