This was meant to be a year-long blog and it's a couple of months over that limit now. Blogging about cricket without any right to has been entertaining. I wasn't edited, which was strange but nice, and readers wrote in, which was gratifying. The last year has been good to people like me who track the Indian team to wallow in Test match success. There was success to wallow in, for instance (not always the case in the forty-something years of my fan-dom); even the rubber we lost in Australia was so stirring it felt like we had won. It was such a good year that the limited overs game was nearly memorable: the Twenty20 triumph in South Africa was a landmark; so was the CB Series win.

I can't see that there's going to be a tour to top the one in Australia any time soon, so this looks like a good place to stop. If, like an Australian, I was used to winning, I might see the past year as the start of a hot new streak, but I'm not. I'm a desi fan who has learnt over time to keep his fingers crossed, not to push his luck and to quit when he's ahead. If a brave new world of cricket beckons, with new forms of the game, new leagues and young players, it ought to be more robustly blogged.

Bye.

	© Getty Images

Listening to Tendulkar declare that the CB series win counted as the greatest moment of his cricketing career, I felt dismayed, then scornful, and then just old.

The dismay was defensible: here was the best Test batsman India had ever produced, back to sublime Test form (he had just struck two centuries and a fifty in the four Test series against Australia), the spearhead of the Indian charge to a gloriously implausible victory in the third Test in Perth, telling the world that India's triumph in a trivial three-nation tournament in its last season (the tri-series tv ratings are so poor that it's being put to sleep) ranked higher than any Test match triumph of which he had been a part.

So, I thought, building up a rhetorical head of steam, this was bigger than the 2001 Test in Kolkata where Laxman's double and Dravid's century and, yes, Tendulkar's three wickets, helped us clinch our greatest Test victory ever? Bigger than the win at Chennai in the final Test of that series, where Tendulkar's hundred won us a series victory against Waugh's Invincibles at full strength?

Bigger than the last Test series in Australia when we got the better of a 1-1 draw. Bigger than winning our first Test rubber in England in twenty years last summer? Edging a struggling Sri Lanka in the league stage and blanking an ageing Australian side in the finals of a small limited overs tournament was a bigger deal than all of the above?

Dismay drove me to derision. I told myself that till recently, till Tendulkar's resumption of the mantle of genius in the Test series in Australia, I had always classed him as the second-best batsman in the history of Indian cricket. I should have stuck with SMG. Gavaskar is unbearable in his present avatar as television pundit, but at least there is the reassurance of knowing he is too bright to embarrass himself (and us) with a comment as crass as Tendulkar's. Would Kumble ever say such a thing? Would Dravid? No and no. This is what comes of not going to college.

Derision didn't work. It's impossible to condescend to Tendulkar. Cricket-wise, he's so colossal that even the all-knowing Indian fan finds patronizing him a stretch. So I did the next best thing. I tried to explain his statement away. He probably meant the whole tour, I thought hopefully. The total Oz experience: Perth, Harbhajan, match referees, Andrew Symonds, Malcolm Conn, the one-day victories, all taken together. That didn't work either. This is how the Telegraph reported Tendulkar's statement:

'If captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni was a picture of calm even after a terrific tri-series win, senior-most pro (and his idol) Sachin Tendulkar was overjoyed. "I'm feeling so proud… It's probably the biggest moment in my career," Sachin told The Telegraph at the team hotel, the Sofitel.' There was some wiggle-room in that 'probably' but the only honest reading of that statement was that Tendulkar thought that the CB series win was the high-point of his cricketing life. And with 39 centuries in Tests and 42 in ODIs, I had to accept that he had tasted triumph often enough to know which victory was sweetest.

This is when I defaulted to feeling not just old, but superannuated as a fan. More than any cricketer in the world, Tendulkar embodies the modern batsman because of his absolute mastery of the two main forms of the game. He has scored more runs in ODIs than any other batsman and it won't be long before he's on top of the Test match heap too. He's played international cricket since 1989 and he has felt the game seesaw between its long and short forms. So when he says that this small tournament victory was the highlight of those twenty years at the top, we should pay serious attention because it marks, I think, a tipping point in the precarious balance between the five-day and the limited overs game, a decisive turn in the history of cricket.

Tendulkar's comment sprang partly from the thrill of defeating a bunch of Ugly Australians in their backyard after a long summer of squabbles. But it sprang also, I think, from a sense of achievement in being the only veteran to have transitioned to the Twenty20 epoch not by the skin of his teeth, but triumphantly.

	Prodigy in 1989, game's grey eminence now © Getty Images

I don't think Tendulkar enjoyed forsaking a place in the Twenty20 team that won the World Cup. I have no way of reading the great man's mind, but given his record in the limited overs game and his competitiveness, I find it hard to believe that it didn't gall him to have to make room 'voluntarily' for the young brigade. The team that won the tri-series in Australia was in large part the same as the team that won the Twenty20 World Cup. Dhoni had asked for his merry men and got them; Tendulkar was the odd man (old man?) out. At the age of 34 he was eight years older than the captain, who, at 26 was the next oldest player in the team.

In this company, with the player auction for the BCCI's new Twenty20 league as context, to have steered this young team home with a fifty, a hundred and a near-hundred in the three matches that counted, was a triumph, a triumph of Tendulkar over Time and particularly sweet for that reason.

Tendulkar was a prodigy when he started out in 1989 and he's now the game's grey eminence. But he isn't just cricket's durable genius; he has also been for fifteen years, it's hottest commercial property. Both the brand and the batsman unconsciously grasped that cricket had mutated decisively, in one of evolution's leaps, away from the longeurs of Test cricket towards the compact formats of the limited overs game. Dhoni's charisma, the hysteria after the Twenty20 World Cup win, the meteoric valuation of young potential at the expense of proven achievement and experience in the IPL's auction, signalled the end of an era when Test cricket had sort of held its own. The surest sign of an epochal change was the fact that the largest sums of money in cricket were now being invested in the newest and most trivial form of the game.

Tendulkar, like Dravid and Ganguly, wasn't bid for in the IPL auction because they were designated champions of their state sides. Of the three, Tendulkar is the one who is there on merit; the other two seem to have been included out of a strategic deference to seniority. I wouldn't be surprised if Tendulkar finds a place in the Indian squad that plays the next Twenty20 World Cup; he may well use the arena of the IPL to try to force his way in. I'm certain, though, that he plans to be around for the next ODI World Cup, to see if he can't add the World Cup to his trophy cupboard.

If Tendulkar's valuation of the tri-series is the first sign of the slow death of five-day cricket, some of us, specially middle-aged nostalgists who live for Test matches, might find it hard to follow the game down this new road. Still, my initial outrage, my sense that Tendulkar in saying what he did, had betrayed the long game, was daft. Old men rail at History; great men master it.

A version of this post was published earlier in the Telegraph

	Kerry Packer didn't ask the world's cricket boards if he could subsidise them for the trouble they had taken to raise the players he was buying for his pirate league © The Cricketer International

I've no idea whether the IPL will work in the long term or not and I'm as surprised as anyone at the money that's been bid for the players. But it seems like an interesting experiment that might create a following for the game at a sub-national level. I'd like Twenty20 cricket to mutate into a four-innings format, like Test cricket in miniature. It's an idea that Chris Cairns once mentioned in a discussion in a television studio. It's a feasible format because even with each side batting twice, the 80 overs would take less time to bowl than the 100 overs of one-day cricket. The sports channels would love it (more time to flash commercials in) and the limited-overs game would be invested with some of the magic of Test cricket: the thrill of another chance, the prospect of the stirring fight back, the shot at a second-innings redemption.

I can see the reasons why people are anxious about the IPL: the fact that it’ll clog up an already crowded calendar, the fear that wads of easy money might devalue Test cricket and the possible disruption of domestic cricket seasons elsewhere in the world. Also, as a middle-aged fan, I wouldn’t trust Lalit Modi and Sharad Pawar as far as I could throw an elephant when it comes to protecting the long game which, for me, defines cricket.

What I can't understand is the chorus of voices - represented on Cricinfo by Ian Chappell and David Lloyd in discussion with Sanjay Manjrekar - asking that the BCCI ought to cut other cricket boards into the money (or that the ICC ought to collect an IPL cess and distribute it among other boards) and, even more bizarrely, that the IPL ought to be jointly managed by representatives of the cricket world's national boards.

County cricket in England is staffed by professional players from England and the rest of the world. Individual overseas players are paid for their services. I've never read or heard people arguing that the West Indies cricket board ought to be compensated by the ECB for lending it the services of players that the WICB has nurtured and developed. Individual players have historically arrived at contracts and understandings with their county managements that allow them to balance the responsibility of playing for their countries with the need to make as good a living as possible. Coming to Lloyd's point that the IPL would be seriously disruptive, it's worth pointing out that the county season lasts considerably longer than the proposed duration of the IPL, which is meant to last for all of two months.

	Why is it bad for a properly constituted national board to organise a credibly franchised cricket league when it's okay for a solitary TV moghul to set up a circus wholly owned by one person? © AFP

The worst that could happen is that no one turns up to watch the games, the television ratings don't draw the eyeballs necessary to sustain the league, and the whole thing collapses. Who cares? The franchise owners don't need our sympathy and at least there'd be a bunch of players with their retirements taken care of. At best it could create a commercially viable tier of competitive cricket and, as Chappell suggests, new hybrid formats for the future of the game. I'll tell you what won't happen, though: having supplied the venues, the audiences, the franchise owners and the structure, the BCCI isn't about to hand the IPL over to the United Nations to run. I don't think Chappell advised Packer to share the goodness then; I'm not sure why he's asking the BCCI to do it now.