WITH Sunil Gavaskar, Barry Richards and Viv Richards to launch the Rest of the World innings it is quite possible that the choice from the array of batting talent available to follow might not get to the crease very often. We must remember, however, that they are to be pitted against the cream of England's post-war bowlers in a variety of circumstances.

Let us therefore attempt the impossible: selecting just two from a shortlist that, in no particular order, includes Everton Weekes, Frank Worrell, Clyde Walcott, Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai, Brian Lara, Javed Miandad, Zaheer Abbas, Majid Khan, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Yousuf Youhana, Graeme Pollock, Jacques Kallis, Aravinda de Silva, John Reid, Martin Crowe, Sachin Tendulkar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Mohammad Azharuddin, Gundappa Viswanath, Norman O'Neill, Doug Walters, Allan Border, Greg Chappell, Steve Waugh and Mark Waugh.

I could go on, of course, but only if I fancy going mad (or madder).

Even now some ruthless pruning is required. Risking ridicule in Barbados, I have to start with the three Ws, but only because my personal starting point of 1953 counts against them. I watched them all on television in 1957 when none quite emulated his performances of 1950.

It gives some indication of the strength of England at the time that they should have won the '57 series 3-0 against a team that included Worrell, Weekes, Walcott, Sobers, Kanhai, Collie Smith, Ramadhin, Valentine and Gilchrist. Of the three senior statesmen, Weekes was a superb back-foot player who made a courageous 90 against Trueman, Statham and Bailey on the Lord's ridge. Worrell, the epitome of grace on and off the field, saved the side at Trent Bridge when he carried his bat for 191. Walcott, the smiling giant who went to the crease with a metaphorical cutlass between his teeth, is immortal for the astonishing feat of scoring five hundreds, and a century in each innings twice, in one series at home to Australia in 1954-55. The attack included three of Australia's greatest bowlers, Lindwall, Miller and Benaud.

Among West Indians, however, none of these three, nor the vividly imaginative Kanhai, nor Lloyd, the long-limbed super-driver, did anything quite so remarkable, or achieved any greater domination of the bowling at certain times, as Lara sometimes has. To put him on the very short list, as I do, he must also eclipse Pollock, who scored seven hundreds in his 23 Tests, averaged 60 and was a completely different player with his wide stance, minimal foot movement but great power and obvious genius. This is an easier decision for the fact that, in addition to his breathtaking century at Trent Bridge in 1965, an innings I watched only on television, I also saw Pollock reduced almost to the ordinary by the brutal speed of Sylvester Clarke when reporting one of the unofficial "Tests" during the period of isolation. Had Pollock played county cricket like Richards, Eddie Barlow and Mike Procter, he would have been prolific. We will never know for sure how he would have fared against a sustained barrage from four fast bowlers.

Swiftly distilling the list further the choice must boil down to Lara, Tendulkar, Miandad, Border, Greg, the more elegant but marginally less tenacious of the Chappells, and Steve, the more ruthless, but also less elegant, of the Waughs. Of the three Australians who remain, Greg Chappell was easily the best to watch, beautifully balanced and the finest on-driver since Peter May. Border, however, stands out as the toughest Test cricketer of the past 50 years. He bided his time in the difficult period after Lillee, Marsh and the Chappells had left big gaps and gradually extracted a merciless revenge for defeats suffered during his early years as captain.

Those too young to witness his horde of Test runs -11,174 in 156 Test matches at a time when Australia were also playing excessive amounts of one-day international cricket (he played 252 of them) -will find it hard to believe that Border eclipsed even Steve Waugh for will to win and stamina, both physical and mental. He was not naturally a cussed character: he made himself become one because he came to believe that it was the way to play Test cricket.

He got into the Australian side in their losing series against Mike Brearley's England and forced himself to become a harder captain by 1989 than he had been four years earlier. Like Waugh, he led by example, at a time when memories of a barren period were too fresh in Australian memories for his teams to play with the elan that has characterised Waugh's side. His tenacity was never more evident than at Old Trafford in 1981 when he stood between England and the Ashes. Batting in the fourth innings with a fractured finger, he scored 123 not out and took 377 minutes to reach three figures.

Like Waugh, whose achievements have been scarcely less remarkable, the iron discipline that restricted him to three or four bread-and-butter scoring shots, notably in Border's case the cut, the pull and the push-drive, counts against him when it comes to a comparison with Miandad, Lara and Tendulkar. Because these three offered (or still offer) more to their teams and to spectators it is from them that the final choice must be made.

I know Lara is temperamentally mercurial and has proved less capable of handling wealth and adulation than Tendulkar, but I am going to go first for the little Trinidadian because he has reached more sublime heights than any living batsman. I did not see the 277 at Sydney that first proved his skill beyond doubt but the record 375 against England in Antigua was spellbinding and I saw the latter part of the highest first-class score, 501 not out, that followed a few weeks later for Warwickshire.

If that was a case of pinching candy from a baby, the three centuries against Australia in 1998-99 certainly were not. His 153 not out in the fourth innings at Bridgetown was the supreme achievement of an epic Test. Moreover, with Lara it is as much the style as the substance that compels. Others have had as sharp an eye and as high a backlift but none such swift hands.

Miandad and Tendulkar were (or are) as good as each other. Miandad scored nearly 9,000 Test runs at 52. He manipulated a cricket ball as the great Pakistani players guide a squash ball. He played cricket as if each game were a small war. I prefer Tendulkar now because he is a prodigiously gifted batsman who was immediately at home in Test cricket as a teenager and will, given normal luck, become the highest run-scorer; because by keeping so still until he plays the ball he is a model; and because, in an era when many of his contemporaries could not resist the temptation of easy money dishonestly obtained, he also seems to be a paragon.

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