Two masters who gave more than most to Test cricket

If the Pataudi Trophy had to be renamed then few are more deserving than Tendulkar and Anderson

- Andy Bull

Spring 2006 and India are batting against England at the Wankhede in Mumbai. The series is all square, one Test each with one to play. England, batting first, have made an even 400, thanks in large part to a century by Andrew Strauss and 88 from his Middlesex teammate Owais Shah, who is making his debut.

It is just past tea on the second day and India's openers are already gone, bounced out by Matthew Hoggard. Sachin Tendulkar is at No 4 and England's captain, Andrew Flintoff, has just thrown the ball to his first-change bowler, Jimmy Anderson.

Anderson is 23. He has already played 12 Tests; the last of them was 14 months earlier, against South Africa in Johannesburg, the other side of the 2005 Ashes, which he spent carrying drinks. It was, he told me last month, "a hard time" in his life. England's coaches had been trying to rebuild his action and he had been sent on an England A Tour of the West Indies to work on it.

He was playing in India only because Simon Jones had gone home, injured. Now here he is, ball in hand, with Tendulkar, who Anderson grew up watching on TV, waiting at the other end and the series in the balance.