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cric info More knows what the rest of us do. The clock is winding down on the golden age of Indian batting. You could even say the golden age of Test batting. Only Ricky Ponting remains from the great Australian line-up; Brian Lara went long ago; Jacques Kallis is fit and hungry still, but he is on the wrong side of 30. Perhaps AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla will join their ranks before they finish, and Kevin Pietersen, if he finds his second wind, may end up as one of the all-time greats, but India's batting wealth in the last 10 years has been freakish. And while everything is cyclical, as Twenty20 skills grow more and more vital to the professional cricketer, it is likely that the best of Test match batting as we have known it is already behind us. This summer presents an opportunity - one of the last few -


to savour what remains of it. It had seemed improbable in 2007, when India toured England last, that Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid would be back again. Even VVS Laxman was a marginal case. But they have all endured. Tendulkar has grown even more resplendent; Laxman has become India's great saviour; Dravid's powers have waned but he was still able to produce a match-winning innings on a difficult pitch in Kingston last month. Still, it can be said with a degree of certainty - though with Tendulkar nothing can be ruled out - that this it for them as far as England goes: one last summer in what remains the finest and strongest bastion of Test cricket. They will play before full houses, before crowds that cherish and understand Test cricket, in conditions that will challenge them and against bowlers who will test their skills. It is a series in which they will be defending their status as the No. 1 Test team. Add in the facts that it is the 2000th Test, and the 100th Test between India and England, and there is everything: occasion, context, the stage, the grand story, the prospect of a proper contest between bat and ball, and the opportunity for one of the game's most artful and versatile batting line-ups to make a final stand at the home of Test cricket. More knows what he is paying for.


It is staggering to think that More was in the dressing room when Tendulkar, just a few months past 17, scored his first Test hundred in 1990, a match-saving masterpiece in the final innings at Old Trafford. He has made three hundreds since on subsequent tours but memories of that innings linger. Of the six hundreds scored in that match, Tendulkar's was the most poignant, and not merely because he was so young. After his senior colleagues departed on a wearing pitch he batted with an assuredness that reminded many of Sunil Gavaskar, with whom Tendulkar shares his physical stature, but it was his back-foot driving that marked him out as special. Two decades later, he will start this tour in quest of his 100th international hundred, a statistical Everest.

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