U.S. Media Compares Sachin Tendulkar's Exit To Mahatma Gandhi's Death

Tendulkar has cemented his place in history as one of the greatest sportsmen and holds almost every batting record in the game. His last Test match against West Indies will be his 200th,. He scored over 15,000 Test runs, 18,000-plus one-day international runs, 51 Test centuries and 100 international centuries.

"Those figures will almost certainly never be surpassed, simply because of the sheer unlikelihood of a player breaking into an international side aged 16, staying in it until the age of 40, and spending almost all of the intervening period at the very top of his game," the WSJ article said.

The NYT op-ed said it would be "entirely accurate" to describe Tendulkar as the most revered contemporary Indian, "or even, with only a pinch of hyperbole, the most revered Indian since Mahatma Gandhi held the nation in thrall. Suspend your disbelief and think of him as a cross between Babe Ruth and Martin Luther King."

The NYT op-ed said Tendulkar has built his reputation not just on "supreme batsmanship" but also on his "unwavering modesty, impeccable manners and an evident pleasure in being part of (and never greater than) the team on which he played."

The WSJ article described Tendulkar as "more or less" cricket itself given that he has been the game's "most recognisable figure for two decades, its biggest star and very frequently its finest batsman.

"His retirement removes a constant from cricket - the game's purest source of technically perfect batting pleasure, a source none of us really believed in our heart of hearts would ever go away."

Applauding Tendulkar's "perfectly compact, spare, balanced, faultlessly complete batting technique", the WSJ article said it is unlikely that there will ever be another cricketing figure of comparable stature.

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