Four years ago, when Rahul Dravid was playing for Scotland in the one-day league, staff at Lord’s were astonished when the India batsman arrived on a non-match day and asked if his family could join a tour of the ground. He wanted them to see where he had made his Test debut in 1996, scoring 95 runs in timeless, elegant fashion before demonstrating an even more old-fashioned virtue and walking after he had nicked a ball from Chris Lewis into Jack Russell’s gloves.

Tomorrow, Dravid will walk out for the toss as captain and, blasphemous though it may be to the ears of Sachin Tendulkar’s millions of fans, the most valuable batsman in the team. In fact, although the howls of protest from Bombay will be deafening, Dravid has regularly proved to be Tendulkar’s better, in Test cricket anyway.

Consider the evidence: looking at comparative points in their careers (Tendulkar started 6½ years earlier), Dravid has had the lower average in only 36 of his 109 Tests; he has been part of a world-record 66 partnerships of more than 100 runs to Tendulkar’s 61; he was the fastest batsman in the world to reach 9,000 runs and is the only batsman to score a hundred against all nine Test opponents away from home.

His wicket is more valuable than Tendulkar’s: in matches that India have won, Dravid averages 77, 12 more than his compatriot. In a golden period from 2000-05, Dravid averaged 103 in India’s 21 victories, scoring 23 per cent of the team’s runs.

That is not to belittle Tendulkar, who has shown a prodigious talent for 17½ years, but to give Dravid the praise that he has long lacked. Yesterday, he stood beside a mock-up of the Taj Mahal, recently named one of the seven wonders of the modern world, to promote “India Now”, a summer-long festival in London. Yet the real wonder is that Dravid was not nominated last month by a panel of the great and good in Indian cricket in an all-time India XI, which marked 75 years of Test cricket on the sub-continent. Mohammad Azharuddin (career average 45), Vijay Hazare (48) and Gundappa Viswanath (42) were chosen ahead of Dravid (58).

The man himself, though, is modest. Even when he made such a terrific debut, he let his fellow debutant, Sourav Ganguly, to steal the attention at Lord’s with an innings of 131. He certainly was having nothing of The Times’s suggestion yesterday that he is better than Tendulkar. “No, I don’t agree,” he said. “Sachin is the greatest batsman of my generation. It has been a privilege to share a dressing-room with him. Sachin, [Brian] Lara, [Steve] Waugh and [Ricky] Ponting are the four great batsmen of my generation and I love to watch them and play against them. I just try to be the best that I can.”

He is not at all envious of the adulation that Tendulkar receives, nor of the reports that he earns five times more from sponsorship than Dravid. “I have a great friendship with him, there is no envy,” Dravid said. “I just like to get on with life. It makes things a lot simpler for me that he gets all the attention. And Sachin deserves everything he has got. He has had to face huge expectation from the age of 16.”

One of the most surprising statistics, particularly given India’s lamentable record in Test series away from home, is that Dravid averages almost 11 runs more when he is playing in front of foreign audiences than he does in India.

“Very early in my career I made it one of my goals to be better abroad,” he said. “Growing up, I heard about how it was a greater challenge to succeed away from home than in your own backyard and right from the start I wanted to do well outside of India.” Tendulkar averages close to 55 at home and abroad.

England has been a happy place for Dravid; his Test average of 88 here is second only to Don Bradman’s. On the 2002 tour, Dravid had successive Test innings of 115 at Trent Bridge, 148 at Headingley and 217 at the Oval. In the 1999 World Cup in England, he hit two hundreds and three fifties. “I just love coming back to England,” he said. “I feel comfortable here. There’s something about it that brings out the best in me and I’m looking to repeat it.”

He said that winning the first Test would matter more to him than getting his name on the honours board with a hundred at Lord’s, yet he admitted that this week’s Test is probably his last chance to make the five extra runs he needed in 1996.

Indeed, a golden generation of India cricketers is passing. As well as Tendulkar and Dravid, Ganguly, V. V. S. Laxman and Anil Kumble are probably touring for the last time. We should enjoy them while we can.

Two of a kind

How Dravid’s and Tendulkar’s averages compare at various stages of their careers

After ten Tests Dravid 48.3; Tendulkar 41.2

25 Tests Dravid 57.5; Tendulkar 44.8

50 Tests Dravid 52.3; Tendulkar 49.8

75 Tests Dravid 57.4; Tendulkar 56.0

100 Tests Dravid 57.8; Tendulkar 58.0

Now Dravid 57.5 (109 Tests) Tendulkar 55.4 (137 Tests)