The Telegraph
India's Sachin Tendulkar completes destiny to become greatest Test run scorer of all time If ever a destiny was writ in stone it was that Sachin Tendulkar would one day become Test cricket's leading run-scorer.
By Derek Pringle Last Updated: 11:38AM BST 17 Oct 2008
Ever since he made an unbeaten 326 in a school match, supreme greatness has been predicted and now, on the first day of India's second Test against Australia in Mohali, that karma has finally come to pass.
Having failed to break the record in Bangalore, Tendulkar needed to wait until the first ball after tea to exceed the 11,953 runs made by Brian Lara. Needing 15 at the start of his innings, he passed his old rival with a guide for three to third man off the relatively unknown seam bowler Peter Siddle, hardly a box office combination with which to crack cricket's blue riband feat.
Tendulkar's celebrations, a couple of glances to the heavens, no doubt to thank his peers in the vast pantheon of Hindu gods, were more muted than those around him. Otherwise it was firecrackers and a standing ovation from the adoring crowd and handshakes all round from the Aussies.
Those runs, with power to add (he currently has no thoughts of retirement), consign the brilliant Lara to second place. A wristy left-hander, Lara held the record for almost three years after overtaking Allan Border's total in 2005, and many will feel this latest succession has seen the rightful ruler deposed.
Rightly or wrongly, Lara's runs, the bulk of them made when West Indies were a waning side, are seen to have a greater value than Tendulkar's.
Then there is the manner of the run-scoring. Even his greatest acolytes would struggle to find great artistry in Tendulkar's shots, and it was entirely apposite when Don Bradman, the most efficient but not the most elegant run-scorer in history, confided to Tendulkar's wife that her husband reminded him of himself as a batsman.
Certainly, Lara's strokeplay had more of an instinctive flourish to it, a quality that could destroy the best laid plans.
Pressure stalks you constantly at this level and while Lara felt it propping up a poor team, the burden upon Tendulkar is one of enormous expectation.
With over a billion citizens, most of them cricket-obsessives, India exerts a crushing pressure on its cricketers. As the country's central idol, Tendulkar is the most worshipped batsman in world cricket, a potentially overwhelming force should such distractions ever have caught his eye. They say that when Tendulkar bats India stops, which may be why they haven't yet taken over the global economy.
That unerring eye has yet to be deflected, and while occasionally lured into indiscretions outside off-stump, he has never been lured into any outside the laws. No match-fixing taint, nor lurid off-field revelations, nor hissy fits, has ever strained Tendulkar's saintliness over his 20-year career. Indeed, he appears to have no unnatural appetites whatever, save for scoring runs and Formula One.
Plenty are born with talent but few are as driven as Tendulkar to express it in full and he is as much a product of the nets as blessed genes. He came to recognise his gift at an early age and did not squander it, which is not as easy as you might think among "chosen ones."
The endless practice has not yet dulled his zest for the game, but it has made his batting mechanically precise. That does not make him dull to watch, though, and he seduces the same way that a Rolex watch does - ticking and tocking inexorably along in a manner that is both silk and steel.
He is certainly tough. His Test debut, made against Pakistan when he was 16, left him bloodied but unbowed, after Waqar Younis struck him in the mouth during the second innings. At five feet six inches tall, he has always looked ripe for some bullying by nasty fast bowlers, but he dusted himself down and carried on, making his maiden half-century in the process.
With cricket attracting ever-increasing sums of money, leading cricketers have hit the jackpot of late. Not that Tendulkar will notice the shift. As the Tiger Woods of cricket, he was a multi-millionaire from cricket long before Stanford provided the means for others to join him. Not that he seems driven by money and by all accounts still lives modestly with his family.
Over a glittering career only his time as India's captain can be deemed a failure. Not a natural leader, he struggled to command others as he commanded himself. But bossing bowlers, well, that it his speciality and that could continue for a good while yet.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges