It's showtime! World Cup stage set for Murali and Sachin's last clash

It is the perfect showpiece between the two best teams in an ideal setting, but today's subcontinental World Cup final between India and Sri Lanka in Mumbai is indisputably the tale of two men. 

For all the potential matchwinners on show and the drama that will unfold at the Wankhede Stadium, all eyes will be on the Little Master and the sorcerer from Kandy playing his final game.

Sachin Tendulkar and Muttiah Muralitharan are very different characters, one classic in his orthodoxy and the other so unusual that his achievements will forever have an asterisk placed alongside them. 

Nasser Hussain argues that the time has come for Tendulkar to be recognised as the greatest batsman the game has ever seen and that view should no longer raise the hackles of those who consider it sacrilege for anyone to be mentioned in the same breath as Sir Don Bradman. 

The fact is that Tendulkar, as driven as ever at 37, is on the verge of probably the most extraordinary individual achievement in cricket history, a mastery of batting in both the Test and one-day games.

Tendulkar has scored 51 Test hundreds and 48 in one-day internationals, his two centuries so far in this tournament leaving him needing just one more for the Indian to have raised his bat in international cricket 100 times. 

For a while, as Pakistan's hapless f ielders dropped chance after chance on Wednesday in Mohali, it seemed as though Tendulkar was going to reach a milestone that will never be repeated a game early, in the semi-final rather than today in one of the biggest matches of even his unprecedented career.

Yet so badly did Tendulkar bat even in reaching 85, proof that he is human after all by appearing nervous, that it seemed as though his sense of history got the better of him. The great man slapped yet another chance, his fifth and final one, almost apologetically straight to cover, saving his great landmark bid for today. 

Only the certainty that Tendulkar, the most revered star in the second most populous country in the world, is too much of a team man for all his phenomenal success can keep the conspiracy theorists at bay. He would not throw it away when India need his runs now as much as at any time in the last 21 years. 

The stage, though, is now set. Mumbai, the glamorous hub of the modern India, demands that its favourite son fulfils the expectations of a billion people and wins the World Cup for his country with his 100th hundred. No pressure then, Sachin. 

Standing in his way is another great who has followed a very different career path, a man who had to overcome the purists and forced the throwing laws to be rewritten on his way to becoming world cricket's leading wicket-taker. 

When the Australian umpires Darrell Hair and Ross Emerson called Murali for chucking in the late Nineties, a brutal humiliation being played out very publicly, it seemed as though this man, who bowled like no one had done before, was going to be hounded out of the game. That he could retire today as a World Cup winner for the second time is a monumental achievement against the odds. 

We now know, after countless biomechanical tests, that Murali's shoulder can rotate abnormally, that he can touch his inner forearm with his fingertips and that his wrist is permanently bent. Murali's bowling is legal and although that may never satisfy some, he deserves to take his place in the pantheon of cricketing greats.

Murali, at 38, is carrying all sorts of injuries but he will be patched up one more time and sent out today to try to win a second World Cup for Sri Lanka. 

Lasith Malinga may prove more potent in the death overs and Ajantha Mendis, another 'spinner' of mystery, may pose more of a danger to India's formidable batting line-up than an ailing Murali, who is past his best and bowing out at the perfect juncture. 

But do not rule out this proud Tamil, who did so much to inspire his people during Sri Lanka's long civil war, having the final word. He knows enough about being a defiant underdog to gatec rash Tendulkar's party today.