Sachin Tendulkar, in a league of one

Finally, 34 innings after getting his 99th international century, Sachin Tendulkar has reached the milestone which is unlikely to ever be emulated.

A century of centuries would have probably never even entered the realms of the achievable for any other cricketer, for so many things needed to fall into place for a batsman to get to that mark. For a start, it required a batsman to be highly skilled in both forms of the game, and in all sorts of conditions. Then, he needed to open the batting in ODIs, for that offers by far the best chance to notch up hundreds in that format. And, of course, it required top-class fitness levels to achieve the kind of longevity required for an achievement of this nature.

Tendulkar has ticked all those boxes, and then some, scoring runs against all oppositions, in all conditions, in both forms of the game, and over a prolonged period of time. His last two away series, in England and Australia, were terribly disappointing, but those are still little more than a blip when seen in the context of his entire career. Overall, through his 22 years of international cricket, Tendulkar has maintained amazingly high standards. As Daniel Vettori once said: "He has been in form longer than some of our guys have been alive."

What is surprising, though, is that it took Tendulkar 34 innings to move from 99 to 100 centuries, especially since he was in such scintillating form from the beginning of 2008 till the 2011 World Cup. During that period, he averaged 65.21 in Tests, 52.41 in ODIs, and had struck a mindboggling 21 hundreds in 104 innings. During this period, no other batsman had scored as many hundreds: Ricky Ponting had 11 in 147, and Jacques Kallis 13 in 113.

Given the form Tendulkar was in at that point, the 100th century was expected to be a formality. Over the last year, it's been anything but a formality. Till this innings against Bangladesh, he'd gone 33 innings without a century, just one short of the most innings he's gone without an international hundred: in 2007, he went 34 innings without one. However, in those 34 innings in 2007, Tendulkar had averaged 47.24, with 15 fifties, including three 99s and four more scores in the 90s. In these 33 innings, though, he's averaged only 32.87, with eight fifties.

Despite taking so long over his 100th, Tendulkar still needed only 65 innings to score his last ten hundreds, which is among his better conversion rates. The passage when he was at his most prolific was between his 31st and 40th hundreds, when he needed only 36 innings. In fact, his 14 centuries from the 27th to the 40th took a mere 50 innings, an average of 3.57 innings per hundred.

On the other hand, one of his worst periods - in terms of scoring centuries - was between 2005 and 2007, when he needed all of 130 innings to move from his 71st to his 80th international hundred. During this period, he averaged 46.46 in 34 Tests, and 42.20 in ODIs. The averages aren't poor, but what hurt his hundreds tally during this period was his conversion - he went past fifty 43 times, but only converted ten of those into centuries. The only period when his conversion was even poorer was right at the beginning of his career, when he took 132 innings to score his first ten, largely because he didn't open the batting in ODIs during much of that period.

The following are behind Sachin in terms of international centuries (top five):

Sachin Tendulkar (99), Ricky Ponting (71), Jacques Kallis (59), Brian Lara (53) and Rahul Dravid (48).