KEY POINTS:
It is one thing to be facing Sir Richard Hadlee and Wasim Akram while puberty still has you in its embrace; it's even more remarkable to be comfortably fending off the next generation of fast bowlers, like Brett Lee, more than a decade-and-a-half later.
When Sachin Tendulkar glided
Peter Siddle to third man yesterday to pass Brian Lara's test aggregate, he'd seen off countless frustrated bowlers and out scored every other batsman to have played this game.
As for the superlatives, the Mumbai native outran them long ago. When you've played international cricket for 16 years, most of them to a standard unfamiliar to all but a few across the course of history, what is there left to say?
The records have been covered - most test runs (12,027); most test centuries (39); most one-day runs (16,361); most one-day centuries (42) - but even they, in isolation, don't tell you how good he was.
For example, those 42 one-day centuries are mighty impressive but become mind-blowingly so when you consider Sanath Jayasuriya is next on the list with 27.
As an American would say, you do the math. Only one New Zealander, Nathan Astle with 16, has scored as many ODI centuries as the difference between Tendulkar and the next best.
His respective averages - 54.18 in tests, 44.34 in ODIs - are among the very best but are also insufficient to convey any sense of his story. However, statistics are a necessary fall-back because his brilliance pushes the written medium to its limits and beyond.
There are no words to adequately describe the heightened sense of expectation you got every time Tendulkar walked to the crease in India or Australia, a place he reserved for some of his great works.
Nor can they appropriately illustrate that temporary feeling of bereavement when he is dismissed, like last night for example, when the crowd and millions of viewers around the world were willing him to 100 but saw him fall for 88 - to the admirable but unworthy Siddle.
For that you need noise, or in the case of his dismissal, a sudden vacuum where noise should be.
The other truly great batsmen of his generation - Ponting, Dravid, Lara and Kallis - can point to records that are comparable and in some aspects superior (Ponting and Kallis have higher test averages).
But none, except on occasions Lara, have generated that same crackle of expectation when they entered a ground like Tendulkar, bedecked in his '80s styled buckle-up pads, does.
It leads to a cricketing paradox of sorts: Tendulkar may not have been the best player of his generation, but he was certainly the greatest.
