History was made, which hopefully will stay for a long long time.

It was elusive as finding life on another planet.

It was supposed to be a job of much younger legs.

It was not supposed to be Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, at the age of 36!

But if any anybody personifies the adage, “Nothing is impossible,” then it got to be him. 46 hundreds later, some 400+ odd ODIs later, and 20 years on, the master of Indian cricket whipped one of the strongest bowling side of the world on his way to an unbelievable 200 in an ODI. The first ever by a cricketer in this format of the game!

History was made, which hopefully will stay for a long long time.

It was elusive as finding life on another planet.

It was supposed to be a job of much younger legs.

It was not supposed to be Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, at the age of 36!

But if any anybody personifies the adage, “Nothing is impossible,” then it got to be him. 46 hundreds later, some 400+ odd ODIs later, and 20 years on, the master of Indian cricket whipped one of the strongest bowling side of the world on his way to an unbelievable 200 in an ODI. The first ever by a cricketer in this format of the game!

147 deliveries and 200 runs – 118 of them coming through boundaries – can simply be termed extraordinary for a player who is 36 years old. Sachin erased the earlier record of 194 by Saeed Anwar. But the fact that Sachin’s legs never tired even in the 50th over while scampering those singles or turning the singles into two’s leaves the efforts of Anwar a long way behind. Anwar had scored a large share of his runs in Chennai against India using a runner. And here, at Gwalior, against South Africa, Sachin scored every single of those runs himself. Even though his body seemed to give in, but his determination never did – which helped him carry through the innings and remained unbeaten.

India scored 401 at the end of 50 overs, and half of the runs came from the bat of Sachin himself. That very statement would run shivers down the spine of the Proteas players. While many of the cricketers are leaving Test cricket to prolong their careers in the shorter versions of the game, Sachin scripted the puritans view that if your body and soul is into cricket, then one can’t leave Test cricket to play another format. 20 years on, his amazing level of consistency came to life in his innings today at Gwalior.

The stadium took a bow when the master reached his double ton. I believe the whole India also did at that time.