The Little Master who was born to runs

So he did it. Before a smattering of spectators, against an unknown Australian fast bowler who once aspired to be a competitive wood-chopper, Sachin Tendulkar became the highest of all Test run-scorers yesterday and shortly after the first to reach a total of 12,000.

The fireworks which followed to mark the first achievement must have been in storage for years, for this event had long been expected. Maybe as far back as 1989 when Tendulkar's introduction to Test cricket consisted mostly of Wasim Akram whistling it past his chubby cheeks. Tendulkar was 16 and said a few years afterwards: "Akram was bowling very fast. I think he bowled four bouncers in a row. It was very difficult and I thought I wasn't going to play Test cricket again."

He was alone in that estimation. In the following match he scored his maiden Test fifty and in the following summer in England, at 17 years and 112 days, he scored a rearguard century of such consummate maturity that it was easy to tell where this career was headed.

Tendulkar's life, already changed, was transformed. He had been a schoolboy prodigy but soon, and in all the years since, he was idolised in a way that is neither normal nor healthy for human beings. Infant prodigies have fallen by the wayside before, and the one with whom he shared an schoolboy partnership of more than 600, Vinod Kambli, was to be a case in point.

But Tendulkar has been different. True, he has shown human traits occasionally, but that should be his entitlement. Mostly, he has conducted himself on the field and off it with a quiet dignity which has usually belied his explosive batsmanship.

It can be said that he has not always done it when it mattered but he has done it often enough, and it is to be celebrated almost as much that he has managed to do it so often when it did not matter.

There has been the odd controversy, most notably when a Test series was abandoned in South Africa seven years ago after he was caught fiddling with the ball and subsequently punished. But it became a sensation not because of his reaction – we still do not know what it was – but because in India they treated him as a god and gods were incapable of such behaviour.

His longevity alone is a thing of wonder. For all but two decades he has gone round the world playing big-time cricket. In India and in all other countries where there is a strong Asian population this has severely curtailed his liberty. For instance, he has a passion for cars (Formula One is his favourite sport) and although he has a showroom's worth of swanky models he cannot drive them until well after dark at home for the simple reason that he would be mobbed.

The idolatry has faded slightly of late as his body has let him down. A severe case of tennis elbow a couple of years ago threatened his career. He could have walked away and owed the game nothing but he has diligently kept coming back, determined, unaffected and if mildly aloof from it all, who could blame him?

Time and again over the years, he has rebuffed the suggestion that it must be hard for him not being able to live a normal life. "That is a normal life, it has been that way since I was 16," is the stock rejoinder.

No sportsman in history, not Pele, not Babe Ruth, not Muhammad Ali, has had the effect on supporters of the man who became the Little Master. The turnstiles were the evidence: when he was in they flocked through them in their thousands and thousands and when he was out they flocked out again. It is 10 years since India Today reported: "When he goes out to bat people switch on their TV sets and switch off their lives."

It should be remembered that Tendulkar has also scored a record 16,361 one-day international runs, making in total more than 28,000 – some 5,000 than any other batsman. He has scored 81 international hundreds.

His ailments and naturally fading reflexes have seen him in mild decline lately. Although he had a thunderous tour of Australia earlier this year his returns since were moderate. Not as swiftly rapacious on his feet as in his real pomp he is still capable of blissful batting.

For a while yesterday it was vintage Sachin, composed yet electrifying, the speed of a bat not as heavy as once it was, still a blur. And then came Peter Siddle, the would-be woodchopper from Victoria. It is difficult to be sure what Siddle, making his Test debut, might remember most: being guided for the historic runs to third man which took Tendulkar past Brian Lara, or later dismissing him with a beauty which moved away and took the outside edge. He was part of history all right.

Bats and figures A history of leading run-makers

*Sachin Tendulkar has just broken Brian Lara's record which the Trinidadian held for nearly three years after eclipsing Allan Border's previous best of 11,174 when scoring 226 against Australia in Adelaide in November 2005.

*Border held the record for rather longer – 12 years – when in 1993 he became only the second player to score over 10,000 Test runs and overtook the first player, Sunil Gavaskar, who himself had been the top Test run-scorer since 1983.

*The last England player to top the all-time Test scoring charts was Geoff Boycott from 1981-83. Other Englishmen to hold the record are Jack Hobbs (1924-37), Wally Hammond (1937-70) and Colin Cowdrey (1970-72).

*As to possible future holders of the record, Australia's Ricky Ponting is less than 2,000 runs short of Tendulkar and 20 months younger.