The record books show that he's only played five games at the very pinnacle of the sport.

Thankfully, though, they also now verify that he is among the finest first-class cricketers that Australia has ever produced.

Darren Lehmann's game was not conditioned by a stint at a cricket academy. He's generally content to stay out of the media limelight, and is happier to call a spade a spade than to deal in rehearsed clichés and euphemisms. He enjoys cricket for cricket's sake and doesn't care too much for the lucrative financial returns now on offer from the game. And he's not especially big on sledging, either.

Unusual traits for a top player of his era perhaps, but it hardly matters. Lehmann is still among the contemporary giants of Australian cricket.

And his achievement today in becoming the most prolific scorer of runs in the history of interstate first-class cricket in the country is testament to his place in the pantheon.

With his innings of 26 against Victoria at his old stamping ground of the MCG, the South Australian left hander has swelled his personal haul of runs in Sheffield Shield/Pura Cup cricket to a phenomenal 10,653. It moves him past Jamie Siddons, well beyond Dean Jones, and even further ahead of David Hookes.

In advance, in fact, of every single player who has participated in the course of 100 years of domestic first-class competition in Australia.

It's a performance made all the more piquant by the fact that his runs have been scored at a time when the competition is widely acknowledged to have been the most testing of all domestic battlegrounds in the world.

Though Lehmann will remain typically modest in its wake - to him, a sense of team far outweighs the individual - it represents a pretty powerful statement of his abilities. And of batting that's been based on a mixture of the pitiless, the ruthless, the murderous and the downright audacious.

It hasn't always been easy, of course. He's battled over-zealous administrators, wizened analysts who advised against an early three-year move to Victoria, and an horrific eye injury that briefly threatened to derail his career altogether. Not to mention a hostile gaggle of critics from the eastern states obsessed with depicting him as a flabby, flat-track bully and a liability in the field.

He's also had to cope with intense disappointment as a series of players with less imposing records have been preferred to him in the national team.

Yet Lehmann's batting, and moreover his productivity, has rarely ceased to amaze.

Refreshingly, there's been little to disturb an appetite for big scores ever since the then jocose kid from the northern suburbs of Adelaide made his opening appearance for Salisbury in first grade cricket in his mid-teens. And perhaps even less to interfere with it from the time of his debut on the first-class stage as a 17-year-old back in 1987-88.

Modest scores of 10, 0 and 24 marked his opening three first-class innings. But, when he struck 51, 79 and 60 in three of his next four, it was clear that something special was afoot.

They were sophisticated innings each of them, simultaneously expressions of talent that has not only remained uncomplicated but has often ascended close to the unbelievable.

He similarly wasted little time in reaching the first of a manifold set of three-figured scores that were to follow, registering his maiden century in just his tenth match and showing the experience to be so perfunctory that he turned it into a double century for good measure - 228, to be precise, against New South Wales in 1989-90.

By that stage, the 19-year-old was well on the way to becoming the youngest cricketer in Australian history to score 1000 runs in a first-class season. It wasn't the first record he was to prise from some of Australian cricket's biggest names.

He had rejected an overture to attend the Australian Cricket Academy on his way to the feat - a move suspected to have long been held against him by officialdom. But Lehmann sagely felt that he was already armed with all he needed to know in order to become a high-performing batsman. Presumably, he realised even then that he had within him the ability not only to bat like a butcher but also a sculptor and virtually everything in between. If that was the case, then he was correct on all counts.

He missed selection as a potential bolter in Australia's 1989 Ashes team - setting a trend that was to mystify friends, fans and even foes alike for more than a decade - but attacks around the country were already coming to realise that Lehmann's was no ordinary talent. Duly, further honours were quick to follow.

He has passed the 1000 run barrier in an Australian first-class season five times; was the Pura Cup Cricketer of the Year in 1999-2000; a key figure in Victoria's Shield-winning side of 1990-91 (still the state's last triumph in the competition) as well as South Australia's victorious team of 1995-96. He has also been a runaway winner of the Australian Cricket Board's State Cricketer of the Year title in each of the 1999-2000 and 2000-01 seasons - the only two summers for which it has been on offer.

There are only two players in history who have made more first-class runs for South Australia alone, and his name features in as many as three of the state's partnership records in domestic first-class matches.

Across a string of other milestones, it's also sobering to note that no Australian in history has amassed as many first-class runs before appearing in their first Test.

Simply, it has been a career bursting with achievement. And, from his first captain (Hookes) to the youngest member of a South Australian side now under his own charge (Paul Rofe), it's almost impossible to find a teammate - or even an opponent - who has a bad word to say about him. Or his impact upon the game as a whole.

To those and other ends, Darren Lehmann has been desperately unlucky that his skills have remained so hidden from the international arena. That 17,430 first-class runs - and an average of 55.86 - have translated to just those five fleeting Test appearances means he has been dealt a wickedly cruel hand.

Connoisseurs of domestic cricket have, accordingly, been the lucky ones. They know that few cricketers who have graced Australian fields over the last century have so dominated this level of the game.

And that, in all senses, it has been a true privilege to watch him.

© 2001 CricInfo Ltd