Amongst all the cricket-related questions that fire themselves into my brain during quiet moments, of which there are disturbingly many for a supposedly grown-up father of two and alleged political satirist, the one that has put its hand up and asked itself most frequently of late has been: How can you tell when a cricketer is in terminal career decline? (I will share some of the other questions in another blog later in the week.)

There is no formula for judging when a blip in form becomes the harbinger of inevitable retirement, or when those proposing the adage “form is temporary, class is permanent”, start to add the words “but Father Time can be a cantankerous old bastard when he wants to be”.

It will not have escaped the notice of the more eagle-eyed cricket followers that Sachin Tendulkar, the cricketing icon of his age and one of the greatest players in the history of the game, is still awaiting his 100th international hundred. All seven billion people currently at large in the world have not scored 100 international hundreds, and for the moment Tendulkar is still one of the them. All their forebears also failed to reach that milestone, and given the changing schedule and nature of modern cricket, it seems likely that all their descendants will fail to reach it as well.

So it is perhaps understandable that, in a game obsessed with milestones, this megamilestone is causing rather more fretting than, objectively, it should. Reaching it is not going to make Tendulkar a greater player, and failing to reach it would not make him a lesser one - though it would be quite annoying for him, and for cricket. If Neil Armstrong had landed his magic rocket on the moon, taken one look outside, decided it looked a bit chilly for a walk, and blasted himself and his buddies straight back to Earth, it would still have been a hugely impressive voyage. Having journeyed so far, obviously the symbolic moment of placing the flag on the moon was important – but the overall achievements of the space programme, and the broader technological miracle of being able to fire people 250,000 miles in a souped-up tin can and get them home again afterwards were, ultimately, of more significance.

It is now 29 innings since Tendulkar scored his 99th international hundred. It is his second longest sequence of innings without a century in his unfathomably massive international career (there was a 34-innings hiatus between hundred No. 78 and hundred No. 79, in 2007).

It is worth thinking back to that 99th hundred, his second century of a triumphant World Cup, both of them innings of peerless brilliance, in which his technique, judgement and boldness were close to flawless; a master in total control of his craft. At that point he had scored 11 hundreds for India in 14 months, at a rate of one every three innings, including eight in 15 Tests, and the first-ever ODI double-century. Statistically he had never been as good.

Since then, there have been 11 months and 29 innings of finely crafted near-misses, sawn-off cameos and failures, a cocktail of uncompleted brilliance and uncharacteristic uncertainty.

Why?

Has the pressure of reaching a milestone, to which no other player has ever, or is ever likely to, come close, affected the mind of the master? Have his 38 years and ten months on the planet, and more particularly his 22 years and three months of international cricket, finally caught up with him? Has his luck simply changed? Is he tired? Is he bored of watching a small, hard, red round thing fly towards him whilst hundreds of millions of people watch to see if he can hit it with a plank of wood? When you have done so 50,000 times, the novelty must wear off. Is he simply sated of milestones, after snaring his 200th international wicket in the Cape Town Test just over a year ago (for which, incidentally, there had been a 34-match, 15-month wait after wicket No. 199)? Or has the ghost of Donald Bradman been interfering, trying to ensure that his closest modern equivalent ends up like him, stranded on 99?

Answers by carrier pigeon to PO Box 100, Cricketville, please. Even the most ardent of Tendulkar fans would admit that the Mumbai Methuselah is closer to the end of his career than the beginning, but recent cricket history is laden with wild fluctuations of form – as dumped-from-the-ODI-side-shortly-after-two-massive-Test-hundreds Ricky Ponting will testify. As will the whole of the England and Pakistan teams. And most other cricketers. Except perhaps Glenn McGrath, who posted a Test average between 15 and 23 in ten out of 11 years from 1995 to 2005 (and only played four Tests in 2003, his one rogue year, when he averaged 35).

Tendulkar has had to face cricketing mortality before, when his elbow injury significantly reduced him as a player and the statistics suggested that he would never touch his previous heights again. From December 2002 to November 2007, he averaged 46 in Tests; 38 if you exclude four Tests and plenty of runs against Bangladesh; 29 if you also remove a two-game spike in Sydney and Multan early in 2004, in which he harvested 495 unbeaten runs in three innings (and which interrupted a sequence of 15 single-figure scores in 21 Test innings). Obviously, if you remove massive unbeaten centuries from anyone’s career, their average will drop, but it nevertheless shows how Tendulkar’s base level of performance sank during his Elbow Years, and the extraordinary powers of recovery he showed to recapture his greatness.

Others have done likewise. Jacques Kallis appeared to be in decline in 2008. From February to November of that year, he batted 17 times in 11 Tests, passed 25 only three times, and averaged 24, despite having played four of those Tests against Bangladesh, and also struggled in the ODI series in England. He then had an adequate but unspectacular series in Australia.

At that point, with 13 years of multi-format all-round exertions on his cricketing milometer, it was not unreasonable to assume that he was on an irretrievable slide towards his cricketing dotage. He promptly embarked on a run of 17 Tests over two years in which he scored ten centuries, averaged 78, and played with a majestic freedom he had largely kept hidden from public view. He also averaged 52 in 20 ODIs, with a strike rate of 86. The pipe and slippers could wait.

What of Ponting’s recent resurgence and/or collapse in form? From early 2002 to late 2006, he averaged 75 in 53 Tests, with 24 centuries, perhaps the closest anyone has come to matching Bradman over an elongated period. In 25 matches from the third Ashes Test of 2006 until the first of 2009, he averaged 44. In 26 Tests from then until the defeat to New Zealand in Hobart in December, he averaged 33, with one century (and that facilitated a sub-schoolboy drop when he was on 0). Ponting’s decline was prolonged and provable. He then clouted India for 544 runs in five completed innings. And was then dismissed in single figures in five successive ODI innings. Was Ponting’s literal and metaphorical Indian summer, in economic parlance, a “dead-cat bounce” (when a plummeting share price briefly recovers before thudding back down to earth), against bowling and fielding that often seemed to have been inspired by a dead cat? Or is he now set for his late-career revival, as proved to be the case for Kallis and Tendulkar (and Lara)?

Few players depart the international stage quite as gloriously as their careers deserve. Gilchrist, who in his first 68 Tests had averaged 55 and established himself as without question the greatest wicketkeeper-batsman ever to pick up a bat and some gloves, finished by averaging 30 in his last 28 Tests, during which time he was statistically only the sixth-best wicketkeeper-batsman in the world, a little behind Prasanna Jayawardene, and a long way behind Kamran Akmal. Herbert Sutcliffe scored 16 centuries in his first 40 Tests, but none in his final 14. Graham Gooch was a decent Test batsman for many years, then a great one for four years in his late 30s, then, when he could have retired, played on. He scored a double-hundred at Lord’s. Then passed 50 just once in his final ten Tests. Ian Botham, who had begun his career as one of the most spectacular and high-impact cricketers of all time, was almost completely ineffective for his last 23 Tests over more than six years, as if Beethoven had wound down his hall-of-fame musical writing career penning advertising ditties for kids’ toothpaste. Viv Richards averaged mid-70s in his dazzling pomp from 1976 to 1981, mid-40s from 1981 to 1989, and mid-30s in his final couple of years in Tests. Jason Gillespie scored a double-century in his final Test innings. If there is a god, he is no respecter of batting legends.

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It might have escaped the attention of all but the most eagle-eyed English and Australian cricket followers, but the two best teams in the world are about to face off in a potentially titanic showdown to decide which is currently the greatest cricket team in the known universe.

Here in England, South Africa hosting India has not received quite the same media frenzy as the Ashes (or, as it is being officially renamed in Parliament this afternoon by the cross-party Committee for Premature Triumphalism, ‘The Heroic and Rightful English Vanquishment of All That is Baggy, Green or Evil in the World’). Not yet, anyway. It has some catching up to do.

It is, admittedly, understandable that the unofficial World Championship play-off has slipped under most English cricketing radars, amid the wild exultation about: (a) England being ahead in an away Ashes series for the first time since David Capel was still just a hopeful, Botham-resembling twinkle in the selectors’ eyes; (b) more importantly, after two Tests of an away Ashes series, England not being bent over a desk in Cricket Australia’s head office midway through a vigourous ceremonial spanking, for the first time since that 1986-87 triumph; and (c) England having gone ahead and, more importantly, not gone behind by absolutely shoeing their oldest rivals. And it was not merely a simple, regulation shoeing, but a shoeing administered with pointy steel toe-caps, stiletto heels and, to back it up, designer poison-tipped socks.

However, for those who have detected faint traces of the impending clash in South Africa, it is an enticing prospect, not least because this series will show how good MS Dhoni’s India really are. History does not bode well for them – they have won only one of their 12 Tests in the land that has produced so many fine English cricketers, a Sreesanth-inspired skittling of the hosts in the first Test in Johannesburg four years ago. And – strap in stats fans - of the 34 Indians who have played Tests in South Africa, only six have averaged higher than their career average.

Nor is it a particularly illustrious six. Leading the way is Kapil Dev, averaging 40 in his four Tests in South Africa, compared to his career figure of 31. Other than the great allrounder, the remaining five are: Dinesh Karthik (101 runs for once out in his solitary Test, boosting his career number to the undizzy heights of 27); Vikram Rathour, who qualifies only by having been marginally less useless in his two games in South Africa (averaging 16) than he was in his four other Tests (10.83, figures which one assumes he does not have immortalised in a commemorative tapestry above his bed); and hopeless tailenders Ventapathy Raju, VRV Singh and Ashish Nehra.

The giants of modern Indian batsmanship – Tendulkar, Dravid, Sehwag, Laxman, Ganguly and Azharuddin - have collectively averaged 34 in South Africa, compared with their overall combined average of 50. This will be an enormous and fascinating challenge for Dhoni’s team.

Before the Ashes, I ran a series of blogs detailing good and bad stats for the players on both sides. Thus far, England have lived up to the former, and Australia have lived down to the latter. If time permits this week, I will do the same for South Africa and India. I began by looking into Tendulkar’s almost unfathomably gigantic numbers.

Tendulkar is the hot favourite to win the race to 50 Test centuries. He needs one more, and now leads Ricky Ponting by 10, has left early pace-setter Don Bradman spluttering in the dust, seemingly unable to respond, and still leads the fast-closing Harbhajan Singh by 47. He also needs just five more centuries to reach a hundred hundreds in international cricket – unquestionably the mark of a pretty useful player.

He has emerged resplendently from his mid-decade slump to hit 12 centuries in his last 31 Tests, averages 63 in that period, and this year alone has close to 1400 runs at 82.

However, he averages just 38 against South Africa, as opposed to 59 against everyone else combined. His average against South Africa is the 79th best of all players since South Africa’s return to Test cricket after their little ‘ethical intermission’, and puts him some 56 runs per innings behind surprise leader - any guesses? – the Sri Lankan batting leviathan Farveez Maharoof.

Admittedly, Maharoof’s statistical sample (94 runs in four innings with three not outs) might not satisfy hardcore mathematicians, but who is to say that if the Colombo Clouter plays 22 Tests against South Africa like Tendulkar has, he will not still be averaging 94? The answer to that question is: anyone outside the most loyal and deluded members of the immediate Maharoof family. But the fact remains that, of the 99 top seven players who have played five or more Tests against South Africa since readmission, Tendulkar has the 43rd best average.

(In an intriguing quirk of fate that must cause unending tension at the family breakfast table, the players with the highest and lowest averages in this admittedly niche category are Andy (70) and Grant (11) Flower. No prizes for guessing who smugly snaffles the extra boerewors bap at their family barbecues.)

Moreover, this series has been extremely cleverly scheduled by South Africa. The first two Tests are in December, a month in which, over the course of his career, Tendulkar averages 47.5, and just 42.9 if you exclude his two December Tests against Bangladesh, one of which included an unbeaten 248. In the other 11 months of the year, his career average is 58.8 (57.6 excluding Bangladesh). This means that, in December Tests not against Bangladesh, he is 25% less effective than he is in the rest of the year.

And it is getting worse. Since 2002, excluding that mauling of Bangladesh, Tendulkar averages just 30 in December Tests. And this grievous problem is exacerbated when the opponents are South Africa – he averages a pitiful 24.3 against South Africa in December, compared to 43.4 against them in other months. Overall, this suggests that, when the greatest batsman of his era plays South Africa in December, he is only 42% of the player he usually is. (Please do not concern yourself with how I unearthed these statistics, nor with the effect they have had on my family life, or the way my wife looks at me when I’m using my computer.)

The only rational conclusion to this is that Tendulkar’s main – perhaps only – weakness as a batsman is, evidently, that he gets overexcited about Christmas. Indeed, if those last eight Christmases since 2002 are anything to go by, he finds it increasingly difficult to focus on his batting when he is thinking about what Santa Claus will bring, or has just brought, to him.

I realise that Tendulkar is not a Christian, but Christmas crosses religious boundaries these days, and you simply cannot argue with statistics. Or with the rumour that the South Africans have been leaving large, bulky presents in the Indian hotel with little tags reading “To Sachin”.

The stump microphone should provide fascinating listening this series. Prepare to hear the close-in fielders trying to distract the little master by saying: “So, Mr Tendulkar, do you think you’ll get that BMX bicycle you’ve always wanted this year? That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? You’d love to have that bike, eh?” Is this bad sportsmanship, or merely professionalism? In the modern game, when an opponent has an obvious weakness, you must exploit it. And if that means playing on Sachin Tendulkar’s uncontrollable giddiness about Christmas, then we must, regretfully, accept it.

Meanwhile, during the brief intermission in the Ashes, Australia have replaced one spinner widely viewed as neither experienced enough nor good enough with one who is even more inexperienced – so inexperienced, in fact, that no one can possibly know whether he is or isn’t good enough, so at least they have replaced an "X" with a "?" on their “Can these bowlers win us the Ashes?” quiz sheet.

If the Australian cricketing public were scratching their heads when Xavier Doherty was picked for Brisbane, they have been scalping themselves with a hacksaw at the selection of Michael Beer. Of course, Beer may even be dropped even before he plays, if Steven Smith is favoured by the selectors, whose current technique for picking their squad appears to involve drinking large quantities of absinthe, riding a quad bike into a wall as fast as possible, and saying the first name that comes into their heads. They have clearly read and learnt from 1980s England supremo Peter May’s influential academic paper, How To Utilise Selectorial Whims To Minimise The Effectiveness Of A Test Match Cricket Team.

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All cricket fans cherish moments when they first see a player, and think to themselves: “This lad is something extraordinary.” They cherish them even more when they turn out to be correct. Few would boast that when they saw Paras Mhambrey bowl for the first time, they just knew deep down that he would go on to take 400 Test wickets; or that they happened to catch a glimpse of Blair Hartland’s debut Test innings whilst on holiday in New Zealand in 1992, and instantly wrote a series of postcards home telling their parents that Wally Hammond himself had been reborn as a Kiwi opener.

Many will have thought it during Cheteshwar Pujara’s mesmeric, match-sealing fourth-innings 72 on debut in Bangalore, for his timing, his decisiveness and precision of shot, and his ethereal stillness at the crease. Time will tell. Time is often a bit of miserable sod in these matters. When Phil Hughes added to his debut 75 with two stunning centuries in his second Test, against Steyn, Morkel, Ntini and Kallis (and Paul Harris), who would have thought that he would be dropped just three Tests later? Not me, and probably not Phil Hughes. And almost certainly not the then bits-and-pieces allrounder Shane Watson, who replaced him and has since reached 50 in 12 of his 26 innings, the highest ratio of fifties-per-innings of any baggy green opener with 10 or more half-centuries.

Debuts, the deceitful little minxes that they are, have made many false promises. Particularly with legspinners. Narendra Hirwani took 16 for 136, Warne took 1 for 150. Kumble returned an inauspicious 3 for 170. Ian Salisbury twirled his web around Pakistan to take 5 for 122. Where did his 600 other Test wickets go? And maybe England should have stuck with Chris Schofield a little longer. Warne’s debut gave perhaps the falsest and cruellest promise of all to England fans – that Australia had unearthed yet another cannon-fodder legspinner to be marmaladed by England’s batsmen. That little reverie took one ball to shatter. It was sweet while it lasted.

I remember when I first realised that Sachin Tendulkar could turn out to be the truly special player that he had been rumoured to be by the world’s cricketing press. It was when he reached 10,000 Test runs. It was clear at that point – in his 122nd Test, with an average of 57 − that the young man was destined for greatness. (Others had suspected it before then, but I like to reserve judgement on players until I am absolutely 100% sure about them, and the 10,000-Test-run barrier seems as fair a benchmark as any. Bradman, Sobers, Richards and Ken Rutherford I remain to be convinced about. The logic is simple: you can easily score fewer than 10,000 Test runs without being a particularly good batsman. But only good players reach 10,000. I therefore acknowledge that Tendulkar is a useful bat. Very useful, in fact – 95 international centuries constitutes a solid effort.)

Bangalore was one of the great highlights of his statistics-boggling career, a display of complete technical and tactical mastery that first transformed the game and then completed it, played with a vigour that suggests he may have several more good years left in him. Once he has ticked off 50 Test centuries and 15,000 runs, perhaps Wilfred Rhodes’ 31-year Test span will be the next major record in his sights.

Tendulkar’s continuing resurgence has been the highlight of a compelling microseries that again highlighted the desirability of macroseries. India finished looking like the world’s top side, playing three days of majestic cricket to seal the series, and Australia ended as a team with more question marks than a transcript of an unusually urgent police interrogation of a hard-of-hearing and inquisitive suspect.

Ponting’s captaincy on Wednesday attracted widespread criticism. To my layman’s eyes it seemed intended to distract the Indian batsmen through sheer bafflement. As they tried to figure out Ponting’s extremely well-concealed masterplan, they could easily have becoming distracted and perturbed, and smashed their own stumps down in confusion. Not really trying to take wickets when he needed to really try to take wickets was an obtuse approach. I have heard rumours that every night Ponting goes back to his hotel room, makes little papier-maché dolls of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, says to them: “Right, Glenn, you bowl from the bathroom end, and Shane, you take the bed end. I’m going for a snooze, and when I wake up I expect you to have bowled the opposition out. Night night.” Admittedly those rumours are ones that I have made up and said to myself, but still, no smoke without fire. There has to be some truth in them.

Back to Tendulkar, officially the world’s best batsman again for the first time in eight years. Tendulkar’s Test career is about to celebrate its 21st birthday, and is now the 11th longest of all time, and the fourth-longest not to have been interrupted by a world war. The three players ahead of him on that little list are Syd Gregory (58 Tests from 1890 to 1912; his longevity can be ascribed to an undroppably assertive moustache), Brian Close (England’s youngest and oldest post-War Test player, his 22 Tests splattered over almost 27 years, dropped six times in his first seven matches spanning three different decades, and proud owner of the most sporadic career in Test history), and dual-nation legend John Traicos, more of whom below.

The Mumbai Methuselah has missed just 14 of India’s 185 Tests in the almost 21 years since he first plonked his 16-year-old feet onto the Test arena, giving him a 92.4% attendance-at-work rate. This currently puts him fourth on the list of highest-percentage-of-possible-Tests-played of the 16 players with Test careers lasting longer than 20 years.

If he stays fit, continues to set his alarm clock, remembers to turn up, and is not lured away by the promise of a stint as lead cricket bat player in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s forthcoming season of cricket-themed adaptations of the works of Mozart, then he could pinch the bronze medal from Sir Garfield Sobers (93% of Tests from 1954 to 1974). That is as far as he can hope to go. Two men remain unattainably in front: one-and-a-half South Africans and half a Zimbabwean. Dave Nourse did not miss a single Test of the 45 South Africa played from 1902 to 1924, and Traicos was never dropped in his 23-year Test career, from 1970 to 1993.

Traicos, who stands alone alongside Richard Hadlee in the Official ICC Catalogue Of Bowlers Who Have Dismissed Both Sachin Tendulkar and Keith Stackpole In Test Cricket, also remained undefeated until the final few months of his career. These facts in isolation might hint at one of the all-time great cricketing careers. Sadly for Traicos, his 23 years as an international cricketer were adorned by just seven Tests, sandwiching a 22-year sabbatical as a humble civilian – three games for South Africa before their ban in 1970, and four for Zimbabwe after their admission in 1992.

Recently unearthed relics from an archaeological dig at Kingsmead in Durban, where Traicos made his debut for South Africa, suggest that this Egypt-born son of Greek parents personally built a special altar with his cricket bag and sacrificed 100 head of oxen to almighty Zeus in return for (a) never being dropped, (b) having at least a 23-year-long Test career, and (c) not losing for the first 22 of those 23 years.

Zeus, always a deity with a wry sense of humour, granted Traicos’ wish with a flamboyant crack of his trademark thunderbolt, and the Egyptigrecozimbabweacsouthafrican tweaker skipped away in delight, visualising the forthcoming decades of batsman-shattering devastation that his tidy offbreaks would soon wreak. Zeus, meanwhile, giggled quietly to himself and muttered under his breath: “Sucker – you can have your 23 years undropped. And you can also have your seven Tests, your 18 wickets, and your bowling average of 42. Got you, Traicos, got you. Thanks for the barbecue. Yum, yum, yum.”

The King of Olympus then high-fived himself, and chirped: “I’ve still got it. Over 2000 years out of the media spotlight, and the Big Z has still got it.” It’s all in Wisden, if you read it backwards.

Some more on long careers in another blog later in the week. Unless the CIA suppress it. They fear needless cricket stats.

Lara has been deleted from the list of players the author is not 100% convinced about. Thanks to Anadi Bhatia for bringing the error to notice

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