In the intervening eight years and more, while Tendulkar has built substantially on his legend, Sehwag has come to establish himself as one of the most feared batsmen in world cricket. The little big man of Indian cricket is the highest run-scorer in both forms of the game, has the most hundreds in both Test and one-day cricket, and has set the standards for the rest to try and emulate. Sehwag, meanwhile, is one of only three men to have made two Test triple hundreds, and missed out by seven runs last December from becoming the only man in Test history to top 300 thrice.
The passage of time and a ravaged body have forced Tendulkar to adopt a more circumspect approach in the later half of his career, but Sehwag has hardly had to re-assess his style. The guru has toned down into a more accomplished accumulator who will only occasionally unveil his destructive capabilities; the intrepid disciple is still an overdrive man who pulverizes the cricket ball and imperiously dismisses it from his presence.
Together, with their own contrasting but immensely effective methods, the two make for a wonderful tandem in the middle. At the Eden Gardens on Monday, they had a huge gathering eating out of their hands with a wonderful association that rolled the years back and brought back memories of their Bloemfontein barrage.
Their 249-run stand in the second Test against South Africa is, believe it or not, only the fourth time the two have put on more than hundred in a Test innings. That’s a relatively bizarre and unexpected piece of statistic, not only given their own exceptional individual records but also because in the last seven and a half years, Sehwag has batted primarily at the top of the tree and Tendulkar isn’t too far down the order at number four.
Indeed, Sehwag and Tendulkar have had only 18 partnerships in all in Test cricket, in itself a massive surprise considering Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid have 17 century stands alone – a world record – and have batted alongside each other in upwards of 100 innings.
Those 18 innings have yielded 1354 runs at 75.22, the second highest average for any Indian pair that has batted together for more than 10 innings behind Tendulkar and Navjot Singh Sidhu, who averaged 77.81. The original master and the man who has modeled his game around Tendulkar, quite a pair they make, even if it is a pair as full of contrasts as of similarities. As South Africa found out the hard way at the Eden.