Farewell to the Little Master: we will not see the likes of Sachin Tendulkar again.

As you know, only seven batsmen have scored more than 50,000 first-class runs. Hobbs, Woolley, Hendren, Mead, Grace, Sutcliffe and Hammond are untouchable. We shall not see their like again. The game changes and old records written on parchment are left unmolested, gathering dust.

Comparisons between the great players of a single era are troublesome enough; fashioning them between the cricketers of the prelapsarian past and those of today is an exercise easily considered futile. And yet the hunger to do so is a craving that can never be wholly pacified.

The 50,000 run mark is an arbitrary figure, for sure, but if you add-up all the runs scored in all accredited forms of senior cricket you find only another eight batsmen have plundered bowlers for more than half a hundred thousand runs.

By this measure, in fact, Graham Gooch (67,057) outstrips even Jack Hobbs (61760). So too does Graham Hick (64, 372).