Off Stump

Sometime in the next 12-18 months, the greatest batsman I've had the pleasure of watching will call it a day. As a cricket spectator, I know that life for me will not be the same in a world where the familiar face of Sachin Tendulkar does not come out to bat at the fall of the second wicket or the commencement of the Indian innings depending on the format. It will be akin to Bollywood without Amitabh Bachchan and somewhere in me there will be a silent tear shed. And its not just Tendulkar. His departure will symbolise the closure of the period in which I did most of my cricket watching as an adult (a largely T20 free period thank heaven). A look at the top batsmen and bowlers since the turn of the millenium is instructive. Six of the top 20 batsmen have retired sometime in the last five years and another eight (Ponting, Kallis, Sangakkara, Tendulkar, Jayawardene, Sehwag, Chanderpaul, and Younis Khan) are clearly on their last legs. Smith, Pietersen, Gayle, and Clarke are all 3

The generally dire performances of Team India since the immense World Cup win in 2011 seemed set to continue after another early World T20 exit but three separate (and hopefully not unrelated) occurrences since give me some hope that things might take a turn for the better in the not too distant future. First, the combination of a sound (dropping Rohit Sharma) and a cheeky (not picking a spinner) move by the new selection committee for the India A squad against the touring Poms smacks at least a little of the boldness that Sanjay Manjrekar asked for . Equally commendable was the decision to downgrade the other Sharma's contract (Harbhajan's was less of a surprise) and the removal of Sreesanth altogether. If the fact that he is now in the same boat as an on-the-rise Umesh Yadav and a resurgent Irfan Pathan plus the exile of his fellow seamer from the England tour just a year back does not serve to put Sharma on notice that this represents his last chance, then nothing will.

Just as the lead characters in what is (arguably) India's best loved movie will remain cherished forever, Sehwag and Gambhir's will go down as India's best ever opening pair in history. The similarities are remarkable to say the least. There is of course the fact that Sehwag's nickname is the same as Dharmendra's character and he's also as easy-going yet destructive as the elder of the duo in the film. In fact, Sehwag's known to whistle/sing Kishore Kumar songs to himself while batting and maybe he sometimes hums one of the tunes that the legendary singer played back for Veeru? Gambhir on the other hand, reflects the same intensity and grit that Bachchan did as Jaidev and is also clearly the more compulsive thinker. Together they created batting magic for India and (prior to May 2011), for all pairs that had scored more than 2000 runs opening the innings in Test matches, they had the fifth highest average of all-time (and the best post-1968) which is a