Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Tendulkar hit his 43rd century in a dead match against Sri Lanka and in the BBC message boards someone mentioned that Sachin Tendulkar is The Greatest Batsman and there was the usual debate no Lara is better , he hit more double hundreds against Australia, no Bradman is the greatest...
To compare Bradman to Tendulkar is silly. They played in different era's faced different opposition and it was a different game then. Who you call the greatest depends on what criteria you choose to define greatness. You can make it purely subjective ofcourse, but thats a wasted argument. You might say that the average is the most important factor in determining the greatest batsman in which case its Bradman, you might just as easily say its the number of hundreds. And that is what most people tend to do, choose the criterion that allows them to arrive at the conclusion they want. Dont like Tendulkar, say how many matches has he won for India singlehandedly (I can name four , all against Australia)? This is by far the most irritating question. Recently when India had to chase what was it 340 and Tendulkar made 150+ runs and we still lost, numerous people commented he couldn't finish the job, it's just like Chennai, he doesn't win matches for India. I'm not sure why people expect Tendulkar to overcome bad bowling and mediocre batting by the rest of the team? It is as good as saying that Bradman was crap in the bodyline series because England won the ashes. Besides you cannot determine how much of a contribution a batsman makes. Is 50 runs a match winning performance? What is statistically true is if Tendulkar plays well , more often than not, India wins.
The first memory of Tendulkar playing a match is when I was still at St Stanislaus. India were playing their old foe Pakistan, in Pakistan and the only two batsmen who were making runs were Sanjay Manjrekar and a 16 year old prodigy named Tendulkar. We weren't familiar enough to call him Sachin then. I dont remember whether it was that series or some other but Tendulkar was 80 not out, the Indian media was going ga ga over the youngest to be centurion, and the next day Tendulkar hit 2 fours and promptly got out.
We knew he was good then. The next time I got an inkling of how good was when in some one day series I think it was against New Zealand or in New Zealand he was sent to open to exploit the field restrictions , copying Mark Greatbatch , and our very own Krishnamachari Srikkanth. And he hammered the bowling. This was like watching Kapil Dev or Viv Richards. And then expectations were set. If Tendulkar didn't make a run a ball he was out of form. He kept making quick fire 40-60's and one day after he reached 80 he braked and just took singles till he reached his century. And it was I think Ravi Shastri who prophetically pronounced that now that he knows he can do it, there will be many more to come.
And they did.
It was somewhere along here that the Indians could conclude, here is the greatest batsman from India, atleast in his generation. Here was someone who could make it to the great West Indian team on merit (soon to be replaced by the not so great Australian team). Here was someone who was world class, and in a nation of 1 billion under achievers there are a precious few we can call world class in sports (Anand, Paes/Bhupathi and a couple other Olympic medalists).
Its perhaps this that makes us say Sachin Tendulkar is the greatest batsman of his time , yes there was Lara, some say Ponting, but no matter what , the amount of joy Tendulkar has given us, only made more so by the disappointments we have faced when he gets out when we need him , when he doesn't give the team the start it requires in a crunch match, in unmatched. When India is chasing 300+ there is noone who doesn't hope that Tendulkar gets off to a good start (no matter how many times they may lament he has failed), and whether or not he is the greatest, our greatest expectations have always been from him.