Nothing flash, just a quick scamper to lift Tendulkar to summit

Sachin Tendulkar's efficient rather than showy run-making has made him the finest of batsmen
Sachin Tendulkar
India's Sachin Tendulkar celebrates breaking Brian Lara's Test run record. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

There was nothing flash about Sachin Tendulkar's assumption of the mantle of the greatest run-maker in Test history. A good first-day pitch at Mohali, a post-tea loosener from a debutant bowler, a fraction of width (which is all it takes), an angled, impossibly broad, blade and three scampered runs, to go with the many thousands similarly accrued since his teenaged debut in Karachi all those years ago.

Tendulkar has been sublimely gifted as few others have been, capable of the most vivid, brutal strokeplay against the finest bowling. But underpinning it all has been efficiency, founded on technical excellence, an analytical brain, meticulous planning and unwavering concentration. It was as if those three runs, which helped him towards 88 yesterday, were preordained in their quiet simplicity to showcase the countless hours as boy and man that have been poured into developing a supreme talent into the player he has become.

The achievement serves to restart the debate over which of the record-holders should be regarded as the greatest of modern batsmen. Wisden, after considerable counselling across a broad spectrum of opinions, had no doubt that Sir Vivian Richards was pre-eminent, but he never held the record. The first batsman to reach 10,000 Test runs, posting on the way what then seemed a preposterous 34 Test centuries, was Sunil Gavaskar, the Indian genius, balanced and focussed, capable of incendiary batting and stodge as the mood took him. From Gavaskar, short of stature like Tendulkar and from the same upper echelons of Bombay society, the young man drew inspiration and gained a pair of grubby yellowing lightweight pads.

It was the feisty, tenacious Australian Allan Border who superceded Gavaskar's Test-match total (if not his tally of centuries), a product of single-mindedness during the bad years and ruthlessness during the start of the glory times. He rationalised his attacking game, reducing it to a few workmanlike strokes - a check-drive through extra-cover, a cut, a pull and accumulation off his legs were, he deemed, sufficient - and they took him beyond 11,000 runs. Someone to bat for your life in heat, humidity and with a broken digit.

Brian Lara overtook Border's record one day in Adelaide, with no more than an unobtrusive left-hander's flick down to fine-leg. No other player has scaled such peaks as Lara while his team floundered in a sea of mediocrity. Lara saw milestones and simply pressed the pedal to the floor to go past them. He was a young man when he made the highest individual Test innings, held so long by Sir Garfield Sobers, at the Recreation Ground in Antigua but a decade older when, on the same ground, he retrieved it from Matthew Hayden. An exercise in self-indulgence it may have been, virtually guaranteeing a draw, but imagine the discipline and drive to succeed. Lara has shredded the finest, playing some of the game's most destructive and match-winning innings. Facing high pace was his only weakness.

All the while, Tendulkar has been climbing the ladder. His has not been a lone journey as Lara's had been, surrounded as he has been by such as Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Virender Sehwag. Increasingly he has battled with injury, the most debilitating that to his elbow, a product perhaps of the unnaturally heavy bat he uses. Yet still, even when in apparent decline, and urged to retire before the game forces him out, he has produced majestic innings, most recently in Australia. Still he makes centuries against the best, capable of such self-denial in pursuit of excellence that he could take a double-century from a tricky surface in Sydney by totally excluding the cover-drive that has been a staple throughout his career.

So who has been the best of these champions? Shane Warne, whom we should respect in this matter, rates the pantheon of those he played against as Tendulkar first, then daylight, then Lara. Coming up strongly, and almost certain to set new standards both in terms of runs and centuries, is Ricky Ponting who may render the argument superfluous. Lara in full flight was just awe-inspiring, vulnerability always a possibility but somehow never materialising. Tendulkar at his peak, though, has been the complete batsmen of his day and for now, just as we did with Lara, we can salute him as such.

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