Two of a kind and the last of a dying breed

Tendulkar is orthodoxy taken to the loftiest level. Orthodox, but never constrained by orthodoxy, he plays Beethoven sonatas and shifts to jazz when jazz is appropriate. Everyone in the cricket world admires him, there is no other option.

Muralitharan is the maverick, the one-off, the reinventor of the game’s possibilities. He is controversy incarnate: his achievements begrudged and despised by many — mostly Australians and Indians — who sincerely believe that their eye is better at reading biomechanics than an ultra-slow-mo camera.

What the two have in common is a taste for conflict and a relish for the constant re-resting of their powers. When it comes to private life, both are discreet, even colourless individuals. Both have a stupendous ability to identify and to take advantage of the weaknesses of others.

Muralitharan retires from international cricket after tomorrow’s match; he will be 39 in a fortnight. Tendulkar plays on, unsated at 37 after 20 years in international cricket. And I wonder: will we ever see such level of excellence again? Will we ever see cricketing outliers so far in front of the rest?

Which brings us to the trickiest present question in football. Who is the player of the season? The answer is obvious — no one. There isn’t an exceptional player. There isn’t even an exceptional club. Players have had good days, players have had good runs, but no one has set his mark on the season.

Perhaps it’s just that kind of season; one in which the Barclays Premier League will be won by default. Or perhaps it’s an indication of a trend, one in which the standout individual player is no longer a natural and inevitable part of the game.

It’s happening that way at World Cups. Who was the player of the tournament last year? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Diego Forlán, of Uruguay, who took his country to the semi-finals.

He scored five goals, making him the tournament’s top scorer, along with three others.

The Golden Boot went to Thomas Müller, of Germany, after assists and minutes on the pitch had been brought in as tie-breakers. Not, then, a tournament marked by an exceptional individual. That has been the trend in recent World Cups.

The last one to be marked by a single brilliant player was 1998, when Zinédine Zidane led France to victory.

The exceptional individual — the player capable of dominating a team sport — is going out of fashion. It’s never really been in fashion in rugby union. By its nature, the sport is less about individuals than other ball games.

The exceptional individual still exists in individual sports. In tennis we have had Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, and until their recent decline, the Williams sisters dominated the big tournaments. In the heartland Olympic sports, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt showed in Beijing that extreme talent can lead to a shatteringly complete dominance. It’s in the money-making team sports that we cannot escape the decline of the Übermensch. True, football has the incomparable Lionel Messi to brighten our lives, but then we must remember that he was a shadow of himself at the last World Cup.

And it is by World Cups that we judge — or used to judge — the world’s greatest players: Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Diego Maradona, Zidane.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that there are no more bad players. Sport is no longer a way of testing the innate talents of players. Acquired talents must be tested as well. Coaching, fitness, training, recruitment — no one these days would turn down a chance on football for a secure job — medical knowhow, all these things mean that there are no soft touches any more. Every player is competent.

That is why Tendulkar does not have a Test average of 99.94, like Sir Donald Bradman. He has faced very few bad bowlers and even fewer bad fielders. It is the same phenomenon that brought about the extinction of the .400 batting average in baseball, as famously argued by the palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, and in these pages by Ed Smith, my colleague.

The second reason is to do with the administration of sport and the philosophy behind it. To understand this, you have only to look at the England cricket team. They were tuned to perfection when they went into the Ashes series in Australia in November. They won the series and were fabulous.

Five months later they have only just finished the tour. They played a horribly anticlimactic series of one-day internationals in Australia, then went to the interminable World Cup. The craziness of the matches they played there reflects the craziness within themselves.

The series of bizarre results came about because they are damn good cricketers driven mad by stress and fatigue. They were road-weary, match-weary and sick to death of each other. It is to be hoped that they are restored by the end of next month, when they play the first of the seven Test matches of the summer, along with ten one-day internationals and two Twenty20 games.

Part of the reason for the decline of the standout footballer is the number of games in a season. Squad rotation is now essential. World Cups come as a last straw. In the individual sports, players can make an individual schedule and take time out when they need it without losing their places.

In more recent times, the Williams sisters have scarcely played any tennis outside the grand-slam tournaments; but have generally won them.

The reason for the ludicrous scheduling in 21st-century sport is obvious enough. The people who run sport are trying to make as much money as possible and the players are not about to argue. But perhaps we who watch should be considered.

Why are we so happy to pay good money to watch sport? One of the biggest reasons is to see a standout performance from a standout individual. We watch sport because we crave excellence.

But modern sport is designed to make excellence increasingly elusive, and perhaps already impossible. We love sport so much that sport can make fortunes while destroying itself before our fascinated eyes. As a result, modern sport is all about the pursuit of competence.

I wonder: are Murali and Sachin the last truly great cricketers their sport will produce? Où sont les Zizous de demain?