Eden Garden provides a perfect ambience for the battle of the gladiators

Not since the Don Bradman-Harold Larwood epic and the Viv Richards-Dennis Lillee saga has there been such rivetting interest in any individual contest. Indeed, this duel at the venerated stadium here — venue for the second Test starting on Wednesday — will be a sight for heavens. One, a magician with the ball who can conjure up six different tricks in an over. The other, a genius with the bat who has multiple answers for each poser.

The Warne-Tendulkar showdown is already threatening to upstage the more important business of the Test series. The PiedPiper effect of the two has found the media following them with unblinking vigil.

The ultimate delight of dream merchants, they may well have looked like Formula One aces if the International Cricket Council had not put restrictions on cricketers looking like mobile billboards.

Tendulkar has proved that he is the game’s great dictator at the crease. If the man decides that a good ball is a bad ball, there is not much a bowler can do about it. Human talents can not be a match against divine gifts. No wonder Sir Don Bradman sees something of himself in the Indian.

Tendulkar thrives on aggression and relishes a challenge. Ditto for Warne. Naturally, it provides for a great contest, especially when the combatants are as talented as they are.

But it’s this unalloyed aggression which has also been the cause of many of Tendulkar’s downfall and a principal reason for his decade-long wait for a maiden first-class double hundred. It, fittingly, came against Warne, who was targeted with clinical precision inAustralia’s three-day match against Mumbai. Indeed, the seeds of victory in the first Test at Chennai were first sown at the Brabourne Stadium by Tendulkar’s mayhem in Mumbai.

“I found out I was human. The worst news is that someone else might find out,” Jack Nicklaus once said after a disappointing day in the PGA Seniors. Warne may empathise with Nicklaus’ words. Only, in his own case, someone did find out to plunder 204 not out and 155 not out.

Warne, who landed in India with a bag of 303 wickets and a halo around his blonde head, should leave Calcutta supplanting Lance Gibbs as the most successful spinner in Test history. He needs just two wickets to get past the West Indian off-spinner’s mark of 309.

Now 28, Warne could well play for another six years. By which time, reckons Richie Benaud, he could get 600 wickets — well past Kapil Dev’s Test record of 434. Provided, of course, he is able to sustain his motivation and fitness.

Tendulkar, like Warne, should stand in a peak of his own when oneconsiders that he has scored 15 Test centuries and 4,265 runs. And he is not even 25!How good is Warne compared to Benaud, the distinguished former Australian leg-spinner and captain? Benaud, now one of the most articulate TV commentators, opines, “I will give you a piece of statistics which might illustrate the difference between him and me. I got 248 wickets in 63 Tests.

He got 300 in the same number. Shane is a much better bowler than I was.”It’s doubtful if any bowler has turned the leg-break more prodigiously than Warne. The conventional variety of which entices the batsman to edge to slip, where the `c Taylor b Warne’ frequency has the same familiar ring as the yesteryear monotony of the `c Marsh b Lillee.’ Taylor, at first slip, has taken 50 catches off Warne — a record in Tests not involving a wicket-keeper.

Batsmen can be conscious and in a semblance of control against the conventional leg-break pitching on the middle and off and deviating towards slip. But it’s when Warne goes round thewicket and pitches it the stuff way outside the leg-stump and spins in sharply that there is an element of helplessness in the batsmen. It’s like having your wallet picked in a peak-hour Mumbai local train — you know are aware of the danger, yet you can do very little about it!

It’s this ball that has been Warne’s single biggest weapon on the tour. And good student that Tendulkar is, he sought the services of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan in Chennai and a local leggie in Mumbai after the first Test to get some practice against leg-spin.

Warne, like Tendulkar, is in peak form. Since January 1997, he has captured 87 wickets in 18 Tests. In the same period, Tendulkar has scored 1159 runs from 13 Tests at an average of 68.18 with five hundreds besides three near centuries 88, 92 and 83.

The Tendulkar-Warne duel has the raw aggression of an Ali-Fraizer bout, the cerebral plottings of a Kasparov-Karpov clash and a heightened skill as in a McEnroe-Borg encounter.