dwarfed by the gigantic Andrew Flintoff and the strapping Yuvraj Singh, a boy-like figure with a cherubic face whose Michelin man-style pads come half way up his thigh," Simon Hughes wrote.

"The poor Indian lifts his hands to Sachin Tendulkar in supplication; Give us respite, a sense of liberation; lift us up from the dark pit of our lives to well-lit places of the imagination with your skill-wrought perfection. He has not a scrap of ego. He is a gracious god. We will never see his like again".

The writer said that Tendulkar never shirked his enormous responsibility and spent considerable time preparing for a game.

"Tendulkar never shirks this enormous responsibility. He spends almost every waking hour seeking that perfection, practising, planning, preparing. He rings his brother, the man whoknows his game best, every day, talking bowlers and bat angles and shot selection. He looks at the pitch and contemplates how he will make runs on it. He is thankful of his talent and dutifully delivers it to his public, the majority of whom have nothing," Hughes wrote.

A self-effacing man who keeps his emotions private, Tendulkar's inner urge to express the hurt caused to him by the audacious terror attack at the city he was born and brought up led him to dedicate his century in Chennai to the people of Mumbai and India, but he admits it was not his nature to play the role of a statesman too often.

"Sometimes I do it, but it is not my way," Tendulkar was quoted as saying by the