Tendulkar's art of batting is beyond all boundaries

It is hard to imagine that the art of batting can ever have reached the pinnacle Sachin Tendulkar took it to in a sumptuous display at Centurion. If there was any doubt that he is the best batsman in the world, it vanished once and for all as he persuaded Pakistan's bowlers to all points of the compass with strokes that were as breathtakingly and daringly conceived as they were perfectly executed and placed.

Chasing 273 for 7, a target large enough to set Indian nerves fluttering, Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag had 50 on the board after five balls of the fifth over. It was batting of a superhuman class against bowling which would have held its head high in the company of almost any batsmen.

Wasim Akram, with 502 one-day wickets beneath his belt, is as wily an old hand as you will find; Shoaib Akhtar has just become the first bowler to be measured at more than 100mph; and Waqar Younis's pedigree needs no elaboration. Add the fact that India were playing Pakistan, with all that that implies, and the scene is set.

Wasim bowled the first over. Tendulkar went back to the third ball, short of a length and lifting, and drove it like lightning past cover for four. He is so short that the stroke seems almost impossible. Yet he used the width of the crease to make room and stood on his toes for an extra inch or two.

Shoaib ran in from the River End. First came a short, lifting ball outside off stump. With calm deliberation he cut it square of third man, 10 rows back into the crowd for six. Then came one further up around leg stump; with a delicious flick of his wrist, he dispatched it along the ground to the backward square leg boundary.

Two balls later, he played forward defensively to a good-length ball that raced away between mid-on and the bowler for four. It was a prodigious stroke that only a genius could have produced. It had everything: placement, timing and footwork.

Eighteen runs had come off Shoaib's first over and he was taken off. When Waqar took over, Sehwag square-cut him for another deliberate six, and Tendulkar played him off his body to backward square leg for four, just as he had against Shoaib. It was bewildering to watch. He then milked Wasim for twos through midwicket. So many of his runs came off good balls.

Trying some variety, Waqar produced a slower ball; Tendulkar saw it, changed his mind, waited for it and hit it for four through midwicket. No batsman in the history of cricket – Victor Trumper, Ranji, Jack Hobbs, Don Bradman, the three Ws or Gary Sobers – could have played better. It was the rarest of privileges to watch it.

Waqar had removed Sehwag and Sourav Ganguly with successive balls before Mohammad Kaif made a doughty partner. It is not easy to bat with Tendulkar in this form but when Kaif hit his first four, Tendulkar congratulated him. Such is the man.

Tendulkar was only cut down to size two runs short of his 100 when he had to give in to a thigh strain and, after lengthy treatment, could do nothing about a nasty bouncer from Shoaib. But this was, and will always remain, Tendulkar's day.