The Surfer

But, while Pietersen and Gayle are established international cricketers, it is the Thiyagus of the cricket world that have pundits most worried. While his situation is unique at the moment, the time when young players will choose to make their mark in T20 leagues rather than do the hard yards may not be far away.

Cricket was his world: reeling off grade scores from the newspaper; picking up every single bat in the change room to see "how it feels"; and throwing balls for hours to anyone who asked, he gave himself completely to the game of cricket.

Cricket was his education. He joined it as a boy and learned life's lessons with everyone watching. It did not make him cynical but rather, wise. He became an eloquent, worldly and intelligent man.

His ODI numbers are so humongous, so colossal, so obscene that it's easy to get lost in making sense of them and lose out on the essence of Sachin. The records stand as a testimony to the impact of his methods, but that's only the byproduct - the real deal was his methods.

It's a thinking man's game and that's what I like about it. You need to take a lot of things into account. Obviously, the tone of the game is changing at the moment with the shorter formats coming in. But skills-wise, especially in Test cricket, you've got to make a lot of decisions; whether to bat or bowl first, when to use your bowlers, how to set the field. Some people think it's just tossing a ball up and smacking it out of the ground. But there's so much to the game.

What prevents us from giving a Tendulkar, a Dravid, a Laxman, Kumble or Sehwag the opportunity to walk back to an ovation from the audience? These are moments that are treasured for posterity by cricket fans like me. "I was there," can be a story for my grandchildren to hear countless times. But it remains a dream.

No one knows the birth date of the Commentator's Curse, and it doesn't appear that any commentator wants to remember the birth year either. But soon after man used a stone as a hammer, the first thumb-crushing accident must have taken place. By that reckoning, the Curse has been around since the early days of radio commentary. What is known for a fact is that the term originated among BBC staffers.

There is Tendulkar, daylight, and then some more daylight. Of those still playing the game today, Chris Gayle tops the hundreds chart with 20. Tendulkar finished with 49, despite his focus solely being on World Cup glory since January 2010. Either side of those nine World Cup matches in 2011, he played just 14 times in three years. When discussing Tendulkar the one-day batsman, the numbers have little meaning. They just intimidate and overwhelm.

There really is no need to look at either his statistics or the countless records that he owns in limited-over cricket to justify his place above everyone else in the world of limited-over cricket. For someone to remain seemingly unaffected by the adulation and criticism for close to two decades and focus on his performance while raising the bar for his teammates is a super human effort indeed.

Place the national psychology and Tendulkar's breathtaking talent against the backdrop of political ambience of the 1980s, in which he made his debut, and you will understand why he was turned into a national icon. The 1980s was the decade of pessimism.

In this gloomy scenario Tendulkar became the symbol of national unity, his majestic wielding of the bat papering, however ephemerally, over all social schisms... We made him a national icon because of our own compulsions, and laid out different yardsticks for him.

Michael Clarke's hamstring strain has candidly exposed the dearth of leadership options in Australian cricket. The system is producing "brands" - players who know how to make money by spreading their talent across different formats in different countries - but not men of exceptional charisma. The modern player is taught how to exist and excel but not necessarily inspire. Their focus is their own game.