SUNIL GAVASKAR'S RECORDS - THE LEGEND AND THE LEGACY

He was the one they wrote a calypso for. Like his spiritual son Sachin, he could rock too...if he wanted, very rarely. Mostly, he was classical. Sublime, perfect.

- BY AMITABH SRIVASTAVA

Five five. Not a lot of inch tape above the mean sea level, but when you pack in unknowable tonnes of a substance called greatness, no scale suffices. How do you measure Sunil Gavaskar, the bats-man? He left some vast amounts of tonnage out there for future statisticians to excavate and wonder at. One milestone came on a warm spring day in 1987 when, against Pakistan in Ahmedabad, he bent over low on the back foot to a nothing delivery from Ejaz Faqih for a late-cut past the wicketkeeper, and sprinted. That would become the first 10,000th Test run anyone with a willow had ever scored. The batsman's equivalent of the first Four-Minute Mile. Or Everest. We duly pick that here, to mark the onset of a phase where Indian batters bested the best. Including one who was like a bionic edition of Gavaskar. Also five foot five, also born in Bombay's Dadar, Sachin Tendulkar did indeed come like a second avatar,