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Billion broken hearts

Reuters, Johannesburg
It was meant to be Sachin Tendulkar's day of destiny. It was meant to be Tendulkar versus Lee, immovable object meets unstoppable force. A sporting duel to die for.
It never happened.
The world's second fastest bowler never even got to take aim at the world's greatest batsman in Sunday's World Cup final.
By the time Australia's Lee was marking out his run-up, "The Little Master" was already back in the pavilion, dismissed by Glenn McGrath's fifth ball, and India were heading for defeat.
Tendulkar's departure broke a billion hearts and must have
deflated his teammates as well.
It may yet reopen the interminable Indian debate over whether their best player should be granted his wish of opening the innings.
Saurav Ganguly's side already faced a momentous task in chasing 360 for victory against the best unit in the world.
Without Tendulkar, that target galloped over the horizon as India went down by 125 runs, Australia underlining their global dominance to become the first side to win three World Cups.
Tendulkar must have been broken-hearted too.
Looking to hook his second boundary of the opening over, he got a leading edge and sent the ball straight up in the air. McGrath strode down the pitch, demanded the honour and claimed the catch. As against Pakistan earlier in the tournament, when Tendulkar had scored a lightning, match-winning 98 and shredded the nerves of strike bowler Shoaib Akhtar in the process, Tendulkar had made a bold statement of intent by taking first strike.
This time, though, it did not work.
You could have heard a pin drop among the 31,000 crowd as Tendulkar trudged off. Virender Sehwag's bold run-a-ball 82 and Rahul Dravid's 47 were reduced to footnotes as India were dismissed for 234.
Ricky Ponting (140 not out) and the softly spoken, broken-fingered Damien Martyn (88 not out), coincidentally, put on exactly that figure for the third wicket during Australia's magnificent 359 for two.
Tendulkar was generous in his
praise afterwards. "Ponting played an important role," he said. "I would surely rate this innings as one of the best."
Ponting's majestic performance came in two distinct parts. His first 50, full of clever pushes and glides and nudges, took 74 balls and contained one boundary.
The next 47 deliveries saw him hit eight sixes a World Cup record three more fours and 90 runs. No man had ever scored as many in the sport's greatest showpiece.
It was almost as if he decided enough was enough, having got to his half-century. The next two balls he faced from Harbhajan Singh both disappeared into the back of the midwicket stands.
Whoever bowled, the ball returned there at regular intervals as Ponting,
all quick-silver hands and dancing feet, made a 13th one-day century.
Tendulkar, honoured as the man of the tournament by Garfield Sobers after the match at The Wanderers, has made a world-record 34 hundreds in the shorter form of the game.
But he would probably have swapped them all for an innings of Ponting's quality and significance on Sunday.
"It was my most satisfying innings, no doubt about that. To do it today when it really mattered was something very special."
Those words, India had hoped, would be spoken by their idol. It must have tortured them to hear them uttered instead in Ponting's Tasmanian twang.