Late in his life, Sir Donald Bradman identified the batsman who played most like him. “I was very, very struck by his technique,” Bradman said in 1996. “I asked my wife to come and have a look at him.

When Arun Agarwal was a teenager in India, he would stand outside the cricket stadium and wait for famous player Sachin Tendulkar’s bus to drive by. Now, he has a cricket jersey signed by “the God of ...