INEVITABLY a choice of opening batsmen from the Rest of the World since 1953 was harder even than it was for England. Names flew to mind: Barry Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Conrad Hunte, Roy Fredericks, Arthur Morris, Bill Lawry, Bobby Simpson, Michael Slater, Mark Taylor, David Boon, Bert Sutcliffe, Glenn Turner, Hanif Mohammad, Saeed Anwar, Sunil Gavaskar, Sanath Jayasuriya. That was only the shortlist.

Six of them are left-handers, so, again, I questioned whether to look for the ideal world of a left-hand/right-hand combination. After all, nine of the 15 opening pairs in Test cricket who have scored more than 1,000 runs together at an average of 50-plus per partnership have been "mixed".

Oddly enough, four of the exceptions were English: Jack Hobbs and Sutcliffe (average 87) Hobbs and Wilfred Rhodes (61), Len Hutton and Cyril Washbrook (60) and Michael Atherton and Graham Gooch (56). Even Australia, who have had highly functional mixed combinations since the war, of whom Simpson and Lawry (60) and Taylor and Slater (51) were prominent, have had plenty of exceptions, notably now the prolific Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer, who were averaging 117 as a partnership after the home series against South Africa.

Time will tell if theirs is just a purple patch but for the moment they have outstripped immortal right-handed combinations such as Hobbs and Sutcliffe, Bill Woodfull and Bill Ponsford, Hutton and Washbrook, or Greenidge and Haynes. There is no doubt that a contrasting pair will tend to disrupt the line of the new ball bowlers and generally make life more difficult for opponents, but again the question had to be asked whether any one of the above matched the available right-handers.

Taylor scored most runs among them and was one of the safest slip fielders there has been. Like Gary Kirsten, still churning them out for South Africa, he was unspectacular enough to be easily underestimated. Australians old enough generally rate Morris -past his peak by 1953 -more highly and Lawry was certainly Taylor's equal, not least for patience and determination. If it was entertainment you wanted, and the ability to get rapidly on top of the opposition, both Fredericks and Saeed Anwar would come close to the top of any list.

I might as well reveal at this stage that I am looking for an aggressive opener as one of the pair because there can be no doubt that the first choice is Gavaskar, a batsman who generally waited for the bowlers to make mistakes and punished every error with Bradmanesque efficiency. To suggest that he was merely a supreme utilitarian would be to damn him with faint praise. He was always a pleasure to watch, even when, with the instinct of the iconoclast, he enjoyed a net in the middle on a sunny day at Lord's in 1975, having decided that India could not overhaul a huge England score in the first of all the one-day World Cup matches.

Gavaskar's 221 in the final Test at the Oval in 1979 was technically the most perfect innings I have seen. At that stage, he had scored 20 hundreds from only 50 Tests and he went on to become the first man past 10,000 Test runs. Of his 34 hundreds, the fact that 13 were against West Indies and eight against Australia, possessors of the fiercest bowlers of his time, proclaims his incomparable ability against the best fast bowling. He gets first place ahead of other superb technicians such as Hunte, Haynes, Turner and the first of the great Pakistan Test batsmen, Hanif Mohammad.

For the no less masterly but more aggressive opening partner desired, the choice has to be narrowed to Richards, Slater, Greenidge and Jayasuriya. The present Sri Lanka captain's swashbuckling 213 at the Oval in 1998 was one of the best examples of how speed of scoring can win Test matches. England, in their first innings in this match, had scored 445 and of the game's minimum quota of 450 overs (given fair weather) only another 291 remained. Thirty-three fours and a six give some indication of his lacerating offside play off either foot.

I have seen Slater in recent years play not just one but a number of innings that equal this one, not so much for the volume of runs he scored as for the devastating effect that they had on their opponents. His last such innings was played only last year, shortly before he lost his place in the Australia side. Few will have forgotten the effect of the way he batted against England in the first Test at Edgbaston, after the home side had produced a record last-wicket stand that might have knocked the stuffing out of weaker men.

It was his first innings against England since the still more brilliant display of scintillating footwork and dashing, yet strictly orthodox, strokeplay at Sydney in January 1999. His seventh hundred in an Ashes Test, 123, was scored on a wickedly turning surface out of a total of 184. No wonder that when Sir Alec Bedser first saw Slater he believed him to be the best batsman since Bradman. It could be argued, however, that he has not fulfilled his talent completely, so the final choice lies between Greenidge and Richards.

Did Hampshire regulars know quite how lucky they were to see them opening the batting together at Hampshire for so long? The more experienced and self assured he became, the less Greenidge suffered, if he suffered at all, by comparison with the tall, curly-haired South African genius at the other end.

Through no fault of Richards, there is, of course, far more evidence by which to judge Greenidge at the highest level. England suffered the full measure of his brilliance, both in 1976, when he scored hundreds in each innings at Old Trafford and nine on the tour, and again in 1984 when his double-hundred in the fourth innings at Lord's, after England had declared from a position of apparent safety, was magnificent. All the Greenidge shots were on view: some of the hardest straight and cover drives, crunching square cuts and thrilling hooks.

But Richards is the pick. In his only Test series before South Africa's isolation, when still very inexperienced, he just missed a hundred before lunch against Australia at Durban and scored 508 runs at 72. Thereafter, he was a travelling mercenary playing innings of insouciant ease for Hampshire, Natal and South Australia.

It was in the Sheffield Shield in 1970-71 that he scored 325 in a single day against Western Australia at Perth and when he returned to Australia for the two years of World Series Cricket, a wonderful experience for him however damaging it might have been to the established game, he again showed that he could dominate the best. Seeing the ball so early and playing with the full blade of a straight bat, he found batting easy and made it look ridiculously so.