Sachin Tendulkar's Test career is the stuff of legend—but it came after years of hard work. An excerpt from a new book on Test cricket

Late in his life, Sir Donald Bradman identified the batter who played most like him. 'I was very, very struck by his technique,' Bradman said in 1996. 'I asked my wife to come and have a look at him. Because, I said, "I never saw myself play. But I feel this fellow is playing much the same as I used to."'

- Tim Wigmore

'It was just his compactness, his stroke production, his technique. It all seemed to gel.'

The player's name was Sachin Tendulkar. Bradman later invited Tendulkar to his 90th birthday. 'We discussed batting,' Tendulkar recalls. 'How good batters could read the ball by looking at the bowler's wrist position and also see which way the ball is spinning in the air and hence could read the delivery as soon as it was released.'

The man who would become the heaviest run-scorer in Test history was first glimpsed on the maidans in Mumbai in the mid-1980s. Most days, the young Tendulkar—his father was a poet and university professor; his mother worked for the Life Insurance Corporation of India—boarded bus number 315 from the suburb of Bandra East to Shivaji Park.

The maidans are a characteristic of Indian cricket; their prevalence helps to explain the abundance of Test players, especially batters, from Mumbai. Dozens of matches take place in parallel; the field in one game normally overlaps with the adjacent field, so that extra cover in one game might stand alongside midwicket in another.

'Your peripheral awareness increased,' Tendulkar reflects. 'After having played on these maidans, when I started playing in stadiums with only one match happening at a time, suddenly finding gaps became easier.'