Sachin Tendulkar is right, four hundred is just a number. It is also a monument, not yet a memorial! It is a monument to longevity as much as it is to excellence, passion and fitness. It is not just an acknowledgement of the fact that you are good enough to be picked four hundred times but of the fact that you don’t mind young men running in trying to knock your head off, stump you short, sneak another run from you in the deep and snarl at you the way you wouldn’t allow your son to!

It is also an aspirational number for an older man who has befriended youth and managed to get so far. When you look at players good enough to play three or four hundred games you don’t analyse them every match, or every four matches. These are blue chip stocks that might see dips but which inevitably deliver over a wider horizon. You sell them for meteoric stocks at your peril.

So is it time for these blue chips to be phased out? If India’s success at Twenty20 is the argument, it is a flawed one because a quick 25 doesn’t quite have the same ring to it over 50 overs. And yet, fearless youth needs to be given an opportunity. The idea of rotating the seniors seems sound when spoken but tends to weaken before the primary objective of putting the best possible side on the park everytime. Is Rohit Sharma a better player than Rahul Dravid on current form? Is Robin Uthappa a stronger alternative to Sourav Ganguly?

... contd.