Sachin Tendulkar is among the very greatest sportsmen, but heroes are made to be surpassed

It was the sort of summer’s day that makes you glad to be alive; but we were watching the telly. We would not normally do this. If the weather was fine, we would play games of catch on the lawn: my 4-year-old self hurling any object that came to hand at my 78-year-old grandfather. The old man would leap about for my amusement, often careering into my parents’ sacred flower beds. He would pooh-pooh my father’s concerns about the wisdom of these exertions, and ignore my grandmother’s distress over the ruin of ‘yet another pair of trousers’. My delight would urge him to even greater theatrics when their backs were turned.

But that afternoon, Saturday 11^th August 1990, was different because a teenager called Sachin Tendulkar was making England’s finest cricketers toil in Manchester. Tendulkar’s innings of 68 that day is overshadowed by the match-saving century he scored two days later.