Its hard to imagine of any other Indian player who’s been more written about or revered than Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Despite already having played for more than 2 decades at the very highest level, the man looks good to play for a few years more and keep accumulating runs, something that he’s been doing at a very good rate since age 16, when he made his international debut.

As mentioned, Sachin started off on the big stage at the young age of 16 against Imran Khan’s Pakistan in Karachi. It was evident from the very beginning that the man is gifted with special talent but it was not until his first tours of England and Australia that the world sat up to take notice of the man from Mumbai. His magnificent 114 on a bouncy WACA track on his 1991-92 tour is still rated as amongst the very best knocks by a visiting batsman in Australia. Over the course of his career, Tendulkar made plenty of runs and importantly, away from home as well. Some of his best knocks have come against the Aussies in their own backyard; infact he’s scored atleast one 100 on each of the four visits that he’s made down under. In 2008, he went past Brian Lara to become the leading run getter in Tests and even went on to become the 1st man to breach the 12,000 run barrier in Test matches. In the one-day arena, he’s by far been the leading run scorer for quite a few years now; he was also the 1st batsman to scale the 10,000 and then the 15,000 run summit in one-dayers.

Sachin’s batsmanship has revolved around a strong technique and yet he’s always possessed the ability to score big and quick when the situation demands. One of the turning points in his career came on the New Zealand tour of 1994, when an injury to a fellow batsman prompted the team management to ask him to open the innings in a one-dayer. Sachin was in no mood to let that opportunity go by and scored a breathtaking 82 off 49 balls. Such has been his dominance over bowlers across the world that once even the great Shane Warne confessed to having nightmares about Sachin dancing down the track and hitting him over his head. No lesser than Sir Donald Bradman has gone on record to say that Sachin of all the batsmen that he’d seen over the years reminded him the most about his own playing style. Another point worth mentioning is that for all his skills with the bat, Sachin’s been more than a handy bowler as well having claimed over 150 wickets in one-dayers and 44 in Tests.

An icon in India, Sachin was recently honoured with the nation’s 2nd highest civilian honour, the ‘Padma Vibhushan’. The extent to which fans in India look upto Sachin and his innings can best be summarized by this saying, one of the most popular amongst his fans; “Cricket is my religion and Sachin is my God.”