Qaiser Mohammad Ali

New Delhi, March 16:

From wearing lipstick during his maiden tour of Pakistan in 1989 to scoring 10,000 Test runs on Wednesday, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar has travelled a 15-year journey to be widely regarded as the best contemporary batsman — and one of the best ever.

When Tendulkar, playing his 122nd Test, scored the 10,000th run, he became only the fifth batsman in Test history — and second Indian after Sunil Gavaskar — to reach the coveted mark. Plus, if you add his 37 ODI centuries and 34 Test hundreds, he has a world record of 71 international three-figure innings — a mark that will be extremely difficult to surpass.

At the end of his 52-run knock on Wednesday, Tendulkar now has an aggregate of 10,025 runs in 195 innings of 122 Tests. He has scored those runs at 57.61 with an unbeaten 248 as his highest. In addition, he has cracked 40 half-centuries and held 75 catches. Tendulkar has also played 342 ODIs — the maximum after Wasim Akram’s world-record 356 — in which he has scored 13,497 runs. Tendulkar made his international debut on the 1989 tour of Pakistan, where he audaciously hit Waqar Younis for four immediately after he was felled by his bouncer. It was also during that tour that he once wore lipstick and “looked so sweet” during a weekend team party, recalls former India pacer Vivek Razdan. Razdan remembers Tendulkar as a friendly boy whom everybody treated as the “younger brother”.

Tendulkar had all the ingredients of greatness and he showed it in ample measure in Pakistan in 1989, against a bowling attack that comprised legendary fast bowlers Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis as well as spin wizard Abdul Qadir.