whole thing is so silly anyway, nobody has ever combined stats from different forms of cricket.
if it was anybody other than tendulkar heading for this "record" it would have simply been an interesting statistical quirk not a genuine milestone.
Tendulkar scoring 50 test match tons was a huge achievement this whole thing is just a sideshow for people who admire individual achievements over all else.
Sorry man not everyone would agree with you. Here's one of the finest writers of the game, Gideon Haigh's views..
THE Indian novelist RK Narayanan once said that his country lived permanently in the 11th hour.
Perhaps Sachin Tendulkar's great achievement has been to defy that endless cycle of crisis and salvation characteristic of India's history, and to tackle his cricket with such a sense of soothing certainty. But he finds himself at the Sydney Cricket Ground on a personal brink growing ever more vertiginous, 290 days having elapsed since his 99th international hundred.
For a mighty continent of cricket fans, Tendulkar's century of centuries has become a grand consuming passion, a painfully delayed gratification. Never, perhaps, has a cricketer experienced such an incessant bombardment of goodwill and gratuitous advice - heard, unheard, thought and felt.
Indian news outlets have prepared so long and so lavishly for the feat that when it finally occurs, it will almost seem like old news.
Electronic files full of stories with only places and names remaining to be filled have already been written and await only the order to print.
Numberless other specials will already have been cancelled. A favourite personal recollection will be receiving an email from an Indian magazine during the recent Mumbai Test requesting 1000 words of appreciation immediately, Tendulkar being 85 not out at the time.
The piece had progressed no further than an opening paragraph when a supplementary email arrived cancelling the commission, Tendulkar having been dismissed for 94.
For those who savour a little synchronicity with their statistics, the prospect of a Tendulkar hundred in Sydney's hundredth Test could hardly be more exquisite.
It was at the SCG against the first Indian team to tour Australia that Don Bradman, whom Indians generously rank alongside Tendulkar among cricket's divinities, scored his hundredth first-class hundred in November 1947.
The visitors were then so excited by the prospect of being part of such a wondrous record that their captain Lala Amarnath entrusted the ball for the ultimate over to Googamul Kishenchand, a bowler so part-time he did not trouble to remove his cap, and whose amiable full toss Bradman pushed gratefully to mid-on for a single.
No similar charity, it need hardly be said, will be extended Tendulkar's way in this match. Yet very few cricketers are unmoved by the event of a great landmark, and cricket is a rare game in that individual statistical achievement has a transcendent popularity among its public.
Like other sports, cricket is sewn with salutes for spectacles and ovations for champions, but it also takes a peculiar and ecumenical joy in the milestone, both the visible, from the old-fashioned applause for the batsman's 50 and 100 and the new vogue for celebrating the bowler's five-for, and the invisible, captured in the perpetual scoreboard of the record book of each player, team and ground.
Thanks to the redoubtable Ross Dundas, the SCG scoreboard has an enviable reputation for statistical vigilance, seemingly always ready with the annals of the fastest 50s made on Mondays and best bowling figures by bowlers with surnames containing more vowels than consonants.
There is particular satisfaction to be found in the feat requiring time, effort, perseverance, scope and, not least of all, luck. And what feat could express that better than the one on whose brink Tendulkar stands, 23 years and five continents in the making?
The extremes of attention lavished on Tendulkar's quest have already been paid the compliment of huffy disdain. Test hundreds and one-day hundreds put together? Preposterous, say a self-appointed cognoscenti. On Cricinfo recently, the essayist Mukul Kesevan scoffed that the record was a "half-wit's holy grail".
"The real cricketing illiterates are the people who believe that adding ODI centuries to Test centuries and arriving at a hundred gives you a heroic landmark," he insisted. "It doesn't. This isn't just a meaningless statistic, it's a pernicious one, because it equalises two different orders of achievement."
Well, d'uh. Statistics are always equalising different orders of achievement and imposing arbitrary distinctions. Where is the logic in the equal ranking among Bradman's hundred hundreds accorded to a triple century in a Test against England and to a hundred for an Australian XI against pre-Sheffield Shield Tasmania?
And what could be more arbitrary than the designation "first-class" cricket? The designation "international cricket" might obscure the variation in standards between facing Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne one day and Stuart Matsikinyieri and Chris Mpofu the next, but it has the semblance of coherence constituted by a global structure and hierarchy.
Sure enough, day-in, day-out, Test runs are harder to come by than ODI runs, but it is difficult to believe that Tendulkar's astonishing double hundred in a 50-over match against Dale Steyn, Jacques Kallis, Wayne Parnell and Charl Langeveldt at Gwalior was an innings inferior in quality to a hundred in a drawn Test off Mahsrafe Mortaza and Shahadat Hossain at Chittagong.
So, far from being a corrective of discernment and discrimination, Kesevan's argument was simply snobbish special pleading.
On the contrary: about this feat there is everything to honour. Tendulkar's quest for his century of centuries might have started as what the American historian Daniel Boorstin once called a "pseudo-event", but it has achieved a kind of narrative arc by proving so elusive. Imagine what a squib it would have been had Tendulkar hit his 100th hundred in Chennai a week after the 99th.
By seeming so regularly within his reach then just eluding his grasp, Tendulkar's 100th hundred has reminded us again and again that the game will not be hurried or defied, that it resists being packaged and commodified, that the players play, spectators attend and viewers watch in the knowledge that hopes are dashed at least as often as they are fulfilled.
Good sport is not one thrill or spectacle after another. It needs its disappointments, deferrals and delays. Nowadays, cricket administrators hold their publics in such subtle contempt that they worry about them reaching for an electronic game if forced to wait too long for their next six.
Yet sport's specialness derives partly from the sense that the astonishing and the monumental are rare, and that we are blessed when we witness them. Tendulkar is bound to achieve his landmark at some stage, amid scenes of rejoicing and relief, but it will be the more cherishable for the waiting involved. At the 11th hour, everything seems greater, richer and more memorable.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...sachin-tendulkar/story-fnb58rpk-1226235102608