India, June 1 -- In Sydney in January 2004, Sachin Tendulkar conjured a remarkable innings in the last of four Tests against Australia, an effort that brought him his highest Test score at the time. His unbeaten 241 was noteworthy not for the extraordinary strokes he played, but for the commonplace ones he did not.

For most of the first three Tests, the little fella was sucked into driving outside off and nicking off, so he decided ahead of the SCG showdown that the offside didn't exist for him as a run-making option. It's one thing to decide, quite another to execute a plan of that magnitude, but Tendulkar was anything but mere mortal, so he channelled his inner discipline, took the offside out of the equation and still boasted a strike...