text:
For sportstats home page, and info in Test Cricket in Australia 1877-2002, click here
The longest-running cricket stats blog on the Web
Who are the Fastest-Scoring (and Most Tenacious) Batsmen in Test Cricket? Click Here.
Longer articles by Charles Davis
For comments, or to contact Z-score (Charles Davis) email
stats334 at
(The address is like this to avoid SPAM. Type the address in the usual format, no spaces)
Click on the Date to go to that Blog Entry…
Test Program: The Davis Test Match Database Online.
The Test Match database is being slowly extended and currently includes all Tests from 1920-1950. The starting page is here. An information page describing the innovation in this database is here.
Currently, Test matches from 1950 to 1960 are being gradually added.
Ball-by-ball pages have been added where available (a majority of Tests). By putting two overs to a line, Test files can be kept well below 10 pages. Maybe it is not the easiest thing to read, but such stuff is for more dedicated fans.
There is also extra detailed information of falls of wicket for some series.
Shoaib Mailk scored 53* off 61 balls in 2006, but his first 50 is not recorded.
There have been a few innings of similar length that did not reach 50 runs, the most extreme was Naeem Islam in 2010
Aslam Siddiqui reports:
PN Weekes probably faced more than 60 balls in this match.
There have been a number of innings of similar length in T20 cricket that have not reached 50, including a 35 off 63 balls by Lategan again…
During the record-breaking partnership of May and Cowdrey in 1957 (411 off 1146 balls), the West Indies took a second new ball after 96 overs. It would appear that no further new balls were taken after this, even though the innings lasted 258 overs. The 162 overs would appear to be the most overs without a new ball after a second ball was taken (where known). A list of the longest spells without a new ball is here.
16 July 2016
Dropped Catches Report for 2015
I have collated a list of dropped catches in Tests in 2015 (specifically, April 2015 to January 2016, between pauses for World Cup and World T20). This extends my analysis of Cricinfo ball-by-ball texts that started in 2001. For a number of Tests, I backed up the analysis by also checking the texts archived by Cricbuzz. In general, this confirmed the searches of Cricinfo, but a few other missed chances were found. It is also apparent that some dropped catches are a matter of opinion, with the sources coming to conflicting conclusions where 'technical' or 'half' chances are concerned; also whether or not balls carried or missed the bat. The disputed or uncertain cases might amount to about five to ten per cent of missed chances. As such, most chances are clear-cut, but the totals are a little fuzzy, and should be interpreted with that caveat.
In 45 Tests I found 281 missed chances (including stumpings but not run outs). Taking the successful catches and stumpings into account, the miss rate was 23.8%. Overall, there is a downward trend in this figure over the years, suggesting gradual improvement in catching. However, it is not quite as low as the 23.2% recorded in 2012.
More surprising is the improvement apparent compared to the rate of 27.2% in 2014. Some of the changes can be seen in this summary table
% Missed Chances in Tests
While the incidence of dropped catches appears to be falling, the high figure for 2014 remains a bit odd. Part of this is due to Bangladesh playing more Tests in that year: Bangladesh drops a lot of catches and bumps up the average, but even with them, the rate was still elevated. For reasons unknown, Australia dropped more chances in 2014 than in the previous or following years. I have checked the results with some care, but it seems to be a real result.
The team results for 2015 are as follows
I would disregard Bangladesh in this list, because they played only five Tests and took only 25 catches during the year, a very small sample size. Bangladesh had a drop rate of 34% in the previous year. The most striking result is Sri Lanka, whose catching has improved enormously in the last few years, from 34% dropped in 2013 and 29% in 2014 to 21% last year. I have looked through the Sri Lanka results carefully, using both Cricinfo and Cricbuzz, and the result seems to be genuine.
Adam Voges' 269* at Hobart appears to have been chanceless. The highest score in 2015 by a batsman dropped was 290 Ross Taylor at Perth, dropped on 137. The most 'expensive' drop of the year was 165 runs for Steve Smith at Lord's, dropped on 50 and went on to make 215. The only batsman dropped on 0 who went on to make a century was Joe Root, dropped second ball in his ashes-critical 134 at Cardiff.
Zulfiqar Babar was the most unfortunate bowler in 2015, with 17 catches missed off his bowling. Azhar Ali dropped nine chances, mostly at the difficult short leg and silly point positions, five of them off Zulfiqar.
The dropped catches report for 2014 is here.
Notes on the earliest international tours to use air transport…
The 1945-46 Australian team flew to New Zealand: "At dawn on 26 February 1946 the team flew from Sydney. The New Zealand Air Force provided a Catalina for the long flight across the Tasman Sea." They returned on the 8th of April, again with the NZ Air Force out of Auckland, but this time in a DC3.
The flight over took eight hours (Catalinas flew at less than 200kph), and the flight back on the (somewhat faster) DC3 was eventful, with the plane turning back to New Zealand after a short time due to an oil pressure problem, but completing the flight successfully later on the same day.
There is an odd aspect to this: regular commercial flights between Sydney and Auckland were available at the time, so why did the team fly on specially organised NZAF planes? At the time, an airline called T.E.A.L., the predecessor of Air New Zealand, had three flights a week on flying boats, and in fact had operated them even during the war.
I wonder if it was at the insistence of the Australian Cricket Board, getting the New Zealanders to pay?
The day they got back also happened to be the day that flights from Australia to Britain via Singapore resumed, using civilian versions of wartime bombers (Liberators and Lancasters). These were the first civilian planes to use the Changi airport that had been built by PoWs. Earlier post-War flights had taken a route via Colombo, which required a very long trans-ocean leg.
The 1946 Indian team to England and the 1947/48 team to Australia both travelled by air. The latter had a rather long and harrowing flight, and decided that the return trip would be by sea.
In 1947/48, Len Hutton flew out to the West Indies as a replacement player for the MCC. It took him 3 days to get from London to Georgetown.
Information from the fascinating "Test Cricket Tours" website.
Ashru Mishra reports that a Lancashire team flew from Cardiff to Southampton in 1935, on a privately organised flight.
The last tour to travel by ship was the 1964 Ashes tour, although the sea leg was limited to Perth-Colombo. The team returned to Australia by air, playing Tests in Pakistan and India.
(Thanks also to Ashru and Sreeram.)
Here is an article of mine that was published in Cricket Monthly, on the subject of the longest sixes:
and here's an interview I did for Cricket Country, which was actually a written Q&A rather than spoken interview.
In both of the above, the headlines and photo captions were not written by me. Nor was the introductory blurb in the interview, which I do not necessarily agree with. The interviewer seemed to think that I had "proved" that Bradman had averaged 100, but I tried to hose that down in my comments.
Here's an odd little stat
Q. In the last one thousand ODIs, how many times has the team batting second hit the last ball of the 50th over for four?
A. Zero.
The last one I can find is Zimbabwe v Pakistan at Multan in 2008.
Since then there have been six matches where the second team hit the last ball of the 50th over for six (including the recent tie) and even one case of a five, but no fours.
There was a match where Kevin Pietersen hit the last ball for four, but that was a Duckworth-Lewis match, and not the 50th over.
Another odd fact: add it to the list of records held by the very
first Test of 1877.
Other countries, of course, have had wider representation.
1 July 2016
Here's a list of the fastest batsmen to reach major Test milestones. "Fastest" in this context means fewest balls faced, not matches or innings or time. The "Balls Faced" in the table is the exact number when the milestone was reached, in mid-innings. For example, Southee passed one thousand runs during his 61st innings, and finished that innings with 1009 runs off 1180 balls. His one thousandth run came off his 1167th ball.
The leader in each category is quite clear cut, except at 9,000 runs, where Graeme Smith and Brian Lara are extremely close. Tendulkar, of course, is alone in the last two categories.
All these players are relatively recent. Although some data is missing for earlier players, none of them are contenders for a place in this table, so even with complete data this table would not change. Chances are though, that Gilbert Jessop (1899-1912) would be the faster than any modern batsman to 500 runs (about 450 balls), but Jessop never made it to 1000.
After a question on AskSteven, I became curious about the story that Bill Woodfull refused a knighthood offered to him for his contribution to cricket. Being of sceptical mind, I looked into it.
The earliest published source for this seems to be Chris Harte's History of Australian Cricket (1993, p357). Hart says the offer came on the occasion of Woodfull's farewell match in November 1934. Harte even quotes (after a fashion) from a "citation". However, there is no reference offered and no direction to any primary source.
The story is also absent from all other older sources, including Pollard's books, The Oxford Companion to Australian Cricket and Robinson's much-admired On Top Down Under, which has a detailed chapter on Woodfull.
Still sceptical, I borrowed a copy of a Woodfull biography by Alan Gregory, published recently (2011). However, Gregory does confirm the story, saying that he checked it with Woodfull's son and daughter, who had heard it from their mother.
So perhaps we should accept that at face value. Yet it is still a stretch. Gregory also reports that John Dew attempted ("energetically") to get confirmation from both Buckingham Palace and Government House (Melbourne, the supposed source of the offer), but none was forthcoming. There are therefore still no documents or primary evidence.
Having done some family research in my time, I would certainly say that some stories that get circulated by word of mouth around families, and repeated decades later, are not necessarily true! (No disrespect intended). Others have a kernel of truth, but get exaggerated over the years. Casual chatter at an official function, perhaps?
I still wonder about other factors. In 1934, no senior player, not even WG Grace, had ever been knighted for services to cricket; that fashion lay well into the future. There is another element to the story – that Woodfull responded that he would have instead accepted a knighthood for his teaching – and this also has an odd ring. He was just 37 at the time, he had spent a good part of his adult life playing cricket, and he was not a senior teacher yet; it also doesn't sound in character. Gregory mentions that no Australian teacher had ever received a knighthood at that time either; I think Woodfull's claimed statement sounds very unrealistic.
Gregory added that he had asked Harte about the "citation", but Harte could not recall his source.
Refusing a knighthood would have been a big deal in 1934, especially from Woodfull, who was a great admirer of the Crown, and referred to England in his speeches as the "Mother Country".
I also think the offer would have been unlikely politically, coming so soon after Bodyline.
Woodfull did have an outstanding teaching career after 1934, and did accept an OBE, for his contribution to teaching, in 1963, after his retirement. He died, on a golf course, in 1965.
In his last Test series, against Bangladesh, Jason Gillespie averaged 231 with the bat and 11.3 (8 wickets) with the ball, as ratio of averages of 20.5. No one who has taken more than 8 wickets has achieved a higher ratio, although Ramnaresh Sarwan also took 8 wickets and had a ratio of 22.9 (301.0 to 13.1), also against Bangladesh, in 2004.
The highest measurable ratio in any series is 42.9 by Steve Waugh against Sri Lanka in 1995/96. Batting average 362.0, bowling average 8.5 (4 wickets).
Most overs bowled before first wicket in ODis is probably Ata-ur-Rehman of Pakistan in 1993. Exact figures are not available, but. Rehman bowled between 51 and 54 overs for his first wicket, probably closer to 51 than 54. The only other bowler in contention is a team mate of Rehman, Asif Mujtaba, who bowled between 45 and 53 overs; again, probably closer to the 45 than 53.
When Mohammad Yousuf scored 202 at
Lord's in 2006, the batsman above him in the order (Faisal Iqbal) and the
batsman next in the order (Mohammad Sami) both scored ducks. Yousuf is the only batsman to make a double century in
these circumstances.
Adam Voges' 375 runs against the West Indies recently is the most by anyone in a series where he was not dismissed. Previously: 270 runs by Chanderpaul against Bangladesh in 2014.
A little data on
appeals in Tests
ML Nkala v New Zealand at Bulawayo in 2000
Danish Kaneria v West Indies, Kingston 2005
MS Panesar v Pakistan at Lord's 2006
The batsmen were PJ Wiseman, S Chanderpaul, and Abdul Razzaq. The Nkala case involved four consecutive balls. The umpires were Harper, Hair and Bucknor.
This is obviously a rather limited survey, and the usual caveats apply. Some appeals have undoubtedly gone unrecorded and many others might be a matter of interpretation.
As a matter of interest, the bowlers with the highest ratio of appeals to wickets are Panesar, Saqlain Mushtaq,Giles and Kaneria. I don't think these names will surprise anyone. The most appeal-prone pace bowler was Zaheer Khan.
12 May 2016
How Effective is the (Second) New Ball?
Here are some statistics from the database concerning the effectiveness of the new ball in Tests. The data covers about 280 Tests from 2007 to 2015.
There were 472 innings where the new ball was available. In only 44 was it not taken at all, whereas it was taken in the first five overs (overs 81-85) on 336 occasions. The longest innings without a new ball was 145 overs by West Indies against Australia (439/5) at Bridgetown in 2008; the latest taking of a new ball was 146.1 overs by India at Durban in 2013. There were only 25 cases of no new ball by the 100 over mark.
In innings that lasted at least six overs after the new ball, I compared the number of wickets in the six overs after with the number in the six overs before. There were 405 such innings. I also looked at 'windows' of plus or minus four overs and two overs.
A 'Ratio' of more than one indicates a benefit to taking the new ball. In the six overs before the new ball, there were wickets in only 87 innings, against 195 innings after the new ball. Overall, there were 2.72 times as many wickets in the six overs after the new ball than in the previous six overs, with even greater benefits with narrower windows.
These numbers suggest that early taking of the new ball is very beneficial, but it would be unwise to read too much into this. The taking of the new ball is not a random event: captains usually choose to do so when wickets are not falling, and they sometimes use part-time bowlers in the overs just before the new ball.
Indeed if you look at the minority of innings where wicket(s) fell in the six overs before a new ball was actually taken (87 cases) the number of wickets falling in the six overs after the new ball is rather reduced – only 63 wickets. In these cases where bowlers are already taking wickets, the new ball has had no beneficial effect.
I also looked at overs numbered 81-86 in all innings of sufficient length, and compared those with the new ball to those without. There were 347 innings with a new ball and 125 without (many of which took the new ball later on). In those without a new ball, the average was 0.68 wickets falling in the six overs, but in innings with a new ball it was only 0.67 wickets. This suggests no benefit to the new ball at all! However, it is not quite so simple, since a significant number of new balls are taken late in the 81-86 over window. If you restrict the comparison to those innings where the new ball was taken in the 81st over" (218 innings), then the return rises to 0.78 wickets in six overs. There is some benefit evident here, but not as much as might be expected.
Overall, I would say that captains do a competent job in choosing when to use the new ball. Mostly. However, the effects of the new ball are sometimes exaggerated, because captains are likely to call for it during a spell without wickets, and particularly by the choice of second-string bowlers just before it becomes available.
Highest averages in a calendar year (Tests beginning in the year in question)
DG Bradman 1932 402.0 (3 inns)
JN Gillespie 2006 231.0 (3)
CP Mead 1921 229.0 (2)
H Sutcliffe 1931 226.0 (2)
MS Sinclair 1999 214.0 (1)
DG Bradman 1946 210.5 (2)
Bradman also made a score of 167 in a Test in 1932, but the Test began in 1931. If the 167 is included in 1932, his average becomes 284.5.
Add this one to the list of unlikely achievements of Jason Gillespie.
Sreeram points out that since Sinclair played only one innings in 1999, that being his 214 on debut, he holds the record for highest average by any batsman in the 20th Century.
Additions to the 1950s database will be suspended shortly. Holidays beckon.
Melbourne 1964: fielding side Pakistan "appealed against the rain" on the final day; successfully, I might add. Australia had been set 166 in 127 minutes, and was 88/2 in 71 minutes, having scored 60 runs in the last six overs, when umpires called a halt. Before the halt, bowler Arif Butt "stopped and then plunged to the turf", claiming injury. "Shepherd, at the striker's end, looked incredulous and then threw his bat away" (Melbourne Age).
The Pakistanis had earlier been warned for slow play because
they were taking five minutes to bowl an eight-ball over, (equivalent to 16
six-ball overs an hour). How times have changed.
In the Eden Gardens (Kolkata) Test of 2011/12, India v West Indies, play commenced at 8:30am local time on the third and fourth days, brought forward after time was lost on the second day. This is the earliest hour for play to start in a Test that I have noted.
Prior to the day/night Test at Adelaide Oval, the latest finishing time that I had recorded was 8:06pm at Wellington in 2001/02 (v Bangladesh). In the day/night Test, close of play was at 9:25pm and 9:18 pm on the first two days respectively.
12 April 2016
A little discovery to share.
Clyde Walcott scored a century in a session between lunch and tea, Auckland 1951/52. He went from 12 at lunch to 115 at tea, at which point he was out and the declaration was made, with West Indies at 546/6. I believe that this century in a session has not been previously recognised.
I only just found this while sorting through my notes of that series. One source (found in NZ last November, the Wellington Evening Post) gave Walcott's score at lunch and another source had the score at tea, but no source gave both, or mentioned a century in a session.
Latest introduction of Bowlers, by Bowler Number (Tests)
Fall of the Unconquered
Every significant unbeaten innings leaves open the question of how many runs might have been. Statistically, the answer is, on average, similar to the batsman's batting average, but in specific innings one can never know. If the next innings by the player is any guide, there have been some major unbeaten innings that are followed up by complete failures. The list that follows shows the largest unbeaten innings where the batsman was out to the next ball he faced. Often this was in a different match; in the case of the leader, Bradman, it was in a different series.
Both Tests, if applicable, are listed in the table. Michael Clarke holds the record for largest not out first innings followed by a golden duck in the same Test.
Large unbeaten innings followed by a golden duck
Highest ratio of Teams' first innings: first-class matches
The following table shows the most one-sided first innings in first-class matches, led by Pakistan Railways 910/6 decl v Dera Ismail Khan 32 at Lahore in 1964/65
In my opinion, both the leading matches are of dubious
first-class status. The first was the only f-c match ever played by the Dera Ismail Khan team, and the only f-c match for most of
the players.
Peter Nevill took a catch off his first ball in a T20 international. Nevill, of course has played 12 Test matches, so it wasn't his first international overall.
In Tests, it hasn't happened to a keeper, but two fielders have taken catches off the first possible ball in Test cricket. One was PP Ojha in 2009, although he had previously played in ODIs so it wasn't his first international, and the other was AF Lissette at Dunedin in 1955.
Lee Germon and Luke Ronchi, as keepers, took catches off the first ball of their ODI debut, although Ronchi had previously played T20i cricket.
In t20 internationals, Subash Kakurel of Nepal (a keeper) and Saqlain Haider of UAE (a fielder) took catches off the first ball on debut. Haider had previously played ODIs.
16 March 2016
Going Online: the Test Matches of the 1950s
I am embarking on an extension of the Test Match Database Online. The intention is to upload most of what I have on Test matches from the 1950s. It will follow the structure of the 1920s to 1940s material that is already available.
I have started with the 1950 England/West Indies series, and I will proceed gradually through the decade.
The 1950 series was an important series, introducing "Calypso Cricket" to England along with a winning West Indies team. Less well recognised is the establishment, on England's part, of the grindingly slow batting adopted by most teams in the 50s, perhaps in response to the permanent institution of five-day Tests in England. Some slow scoring records were set including (at Lord's) the team record for most consecutive balls without scoring.
Check out Washbrook and Simpson taking 125 overs over a partnership of 212 runs at Trent Bridge. That would take a day and a half at modern over rates, but the slowness was masked somewhat by Ramadhin/Valentine et al getting through up to 140 overs per day.
In those days the consensus was that tight spin bowling could not be scored from without risk.
Dismissed by the only ball faced in Test cricket
In McMaster's case, it was the only ball he faced in
first-class cricket, such was the very dubious
status of this series.
An oddly hot topic last week was four bowlers in one T20 innings conceding the same number of runs, with three of them having identical overs, runs and wickets. There wasn't much in the way of precedent in T20 internationals, but here's a T20 match with four bowlers with identical overs and runs conceded
Here's one with three identical overs, runs, and wickets
Four bowlers conceding the same number of runs was a first for T20 internationals, but it has happened in ODIs
Also in Tests
3 March 2016
Bowlers taking last two available wickets in consecutive balls in a Test match; thus deprived of a chance for a hat-trick…
More than 50 other bowlers have done it once.
As far as I can tell, none of these bowlers took a wicket with his first ball of the next match, thus claiming a 'non-hat-trick', except for the special case of George Lohmann in 1895/96, who finished the first Test with a hat-trick, then took a wicket with his first ball of the second Tests, thus taking four in four.
So it appears that these 'non-hat-tricks' are extremely
rare. Hardik Pandya of India recorded one in the
past week, playing T20s against Pakistan and then Sri Lanka. Apart from Lohmann, there are no other similar cases at all in my
database of Tests, ODIs and T20i. This data is, of course, not complete, but
with about 75% of matches available (almost five thousand matches), it gives
an idea of how rare this must be.
Waqar Younis took three wickets in four balls across two Tests against West Indies and Sri Lanka in 2002. In Ashes Tests, Jason Gillespie took five wickets in seven balls across two Tests against England that were 2 years apart, starting at Perth in 1998/99. He was dropped from the team between the two Tests, but also played against other countries during those two years.
Here is some complete data placing Adam Voges' record-breaking sequence of runs without dismissal in context. The "RUNS" section is covered in standard record lists, but the "Balls Faced" and "Minutes Batted" records are more complete than you might find elsewhere.
I will post these lists in the "Unusual Records" section.
The following 6-ball overs had shots off the bat for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 (not in that order)
West Indies (535) v England Kingston 1935, 117th over. 046123
West Indies v England Antigua 1986, 37th over, during Viv Richards record century. 136240
England (400) v West Indies, Chester-le-Street 2007, 75th over. 263410
Australia (401) v England Brisbane 2031/14, 53rd over. 263401
There are a couple of cases with 12346 (out of order) but no 0s (two singles).
Most remarkable was Mumbai 1951/52, when India hit 4, 0, 1, 2,
3, 8 in the 44th over, 1st innings.
There were no overs found containing shots for 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
In the first T20 against Australia, Hardik Pandya bowled five wides in the first over of his international career, three of them before he could bowl a legal ball.
I can't find any previous instances of five separate wides in
any over in T20 internationals. There are a couple of cases of four wides
plus one no ball, by Kemar Roach and by Dale Steyn,
both in 2010.
This appears to be the most productive 'youth' game, in these terms, played to date. It is possible that more players will be selected for internationals from these or other teams so the record could change.
1 Feb 2016
For a change of pace, I thought I'd share what I have
decided is one of my
favourite cricket photos. It shows Lawrence Rowe being caught by Ian
Chappell off Jeff Thomson at the MCG on Boxing Day 1975. Those familiar with
Australian cricket photography will not be surprised to learn that it was
taken by Patrick Eagar.
The occasion was the morning of one of the first Boxing Day Tests. Some 85,000 people were present, and in those days the MCG stands were physically smaller than now. Such was the crush of spectators that large numbers were sitting even right behind the sight screen.
As you can see, the photo is on the cover of a Bill Frindall book of scores from that time. While it is not a rare book, it is by no means common and so I hope that no one concerned will mind the reproduction. Unfortunately, my copy is worn by use, and so I have photoshopped out some scratches and abrasions.
Why do I like it? Unlike most cricket photography, it presents a dramatic moment in a Test match much as a spectator experiences it, with a wider field of view than normally seen. Many modern telephoto shots, usually taken from the boundary at ground level, are so extreme that they sometimes struggle to get even the batsman's face and bat into the same frame.
I like the elevated viewpoint and the composition. The participants are placed neatly, and all eyes are on the ball, directing the viewer's attention to the main action. The power of Thomson is suggested by his position, still in mid-air even though the ball has reached the slip fielder. The catcher's position is also dynamic, and shows perfect technique. The packed crowd looming at the top of frame increases the sense of drama.
I also really like the lack of intrusive advertising (although I will admit to photoshopping out one small ad).
I did not go to that match, but I did see, with my brother, the equivalent day in the Sydney Test. Even though we got into the ground more than an hour before the start, there were no seats left in the stands (tickets were not numbered or pre-sold) so we sat on the steps of the Sheridan stand, among 53,000 people; the SCG would never see such a crowd again. Jeff Thomson retired hurt three different batsmen that day; for atmosphere and drama, I have not been to a day's cricket since that quite matched it.
I believe that only fragments of video of these Tests have survived.
An article on the most extreme Test performances of the last 50 years, combining batting and bowling performances on the same scale. This is an extended version of an article written for Cricket Monthly online. It should be stressed that my list is 'most extreme', in a statistical sense, rather than 'greatest'.
Some notes on the question: in 1975, did Denis Amiss break the ODI record score before Glenn Turner?
On 7 June 1975 the ODI record stood at 116 (David Lloyd in 1974). That day, Amiss scored 137 and Glenn Turner 171*. Both opened the batting in World Cup matches, with simultaneous starting times, one at Lord's the other at Edgbaston.
At lunch (1pm), Amiss was 98 in 35 overs and Turner 82 in 40 overs. Amiss reached 100 off 112 balls. None of the reports available say exactly what happened next, but it is very probable that Amiss would have reached 116 first. The partnership between Amiss and Fletcher was very fast in the latter stages and would have reached a crescendo going from 150 to 230 after lunch. Turner, however, also scored extremely quickly after lunch.
Less certain is whether Amiss still held the record when he was out. Again there are no exact figures, but Amiss was out in the 51st over, while I calculate from the later falls of wicket that Turner was about 142 in 54 overs. However, the over rate was higher in Turner's case, so his 54 overs may well have preceded Amiss' 51 overs. Minutes batted data would be useful here but is lacking.
Amiss, who had scored the first two ODI centuries in 1972 and 1973, before ceding the record to Lloyd, had probably retaken the record, but for less than half an hour, and perhaps only for the time equivalent of five or six overs.
Australia has selected a touring team to New Zealand with all six states represented. Using place of birth, all six states were last represented in a Test at Bangalore 2010. (Players born overseas were not counted.)
MJ Clarke NSW
SR Watson QLD
MG Johnson QLD
NM Hauritz QLD
PR George SA
RT Ponting TAS
TD Paine TAS
BW Hilfenhaus TAS
MJ North VIC
SM Katich WA
MEK Hussey WA
At the Oval in 2005 and various earlier Tests, there were players from all six states, plus the Northern Territory (Damien Martyn). There were all six plus ACT in some Tests when Michael Bevan was playing, including Karachi 1994.
Martyn and Bevan never played together in Tests, and there are no cases with all eight states and territories. However, it has happened in ODIs, including a game in Cairns in 2003, and for good measure at that game there was also Andrew Symonds, born in the U.K.
I don't have enough data to answer the question in terms
of which teams the players were playing for at the time.
Bowley was an opening batsman in
the era of Hobbs and Sutcliffe. At the age of 39, he filled in for Hobbs in a
couple of Tests against South Africa in 1929.
Jimmy Cook is the father of Stephen Cook, who has just been selected for South Africa after scoring over 11,000 runs.
Does not include players who played no Tests. Alan Jones (36000+ runs) represented England in matches against Rest of the World in 1970, but Test status for these matches was later withdrawn. Jones scored 17,774 runs before the first Rest of the World match.
Most Test runs in an Australian home season
2003/04 RT Ponting (6 Tests) 965
2003/04 ML Hayden (6) 952
2005/06 ML Hayden (7) 949
2005/06 RT Ponting (7) 944
1928/29 WR Hammond (5) 905
2012/13 MJ Clarke (6) 892
1952/53 RN Harvey (5) 834
2015/16 DA Warner (6) 818
1936/37 DG Bradman (5) 810
The off-season Tests in Cairns and Darwin are excluded, but the World XI Test in 2005/06 is included.
In 2003/04, Ponting scored 1034 runs and Hayden 1013 if you include the off-season Tests against Bangladesh.
Homebodies: FS Jackson (20 Tests) and H Ironmonger (14 Tests) played all their Tests at home. For players who eventually played away, the most home Tests from start of career is 13, by several players including WG Grace, DR Doshi and Eoin Morgan. The Most for an Australian is 11 by Merv Hughes.
AJ Traicos played his first and only away Test 23 years after his debut.
After his 1* in the Melbourne ODI, James Faulkner has now hit the winning run nine times in only 35 ODI innings (25.7%). While he is way behind the likes of Dhoni (24 out of 236 innings) in total number of winners, his percentage is higher than anyone in this century who has played more than five innings, and way ahead of any major player.
Dhoni (10.2%) is the leader among players with at least 50 innings.
Data from 1999 onwards only.
The somewhat maligned Mick Lewis, never seen again after the 870-run slogathon in Johannesburg in 2006, appears to be the only player on record to hit the winning run in his only ODI innings (in matches between Test-playing countries). All possibilities before 1999 have been checked.
18 January, 2016
All Out
While there were fluctuations in the past, the most recent results show a sudden and significant fall-off.
Some questions from Ask Steven:
In the 2nd ODI between NZL and SL, Sri Lanka spinner Jeffry Vandersay conceded 26 runs in his debut over. (3 sixes and 2 fours).
No one has else has conceded 26 or more runs in an over on debut or during the first ODI in which they bowled. Matthew Hayden conceded 18 runs in his only over in ODIs, and I can't find anyone else since then who has conceded more in their first over.
Dean Elgar and Stiaan Van Zyl were the last two South African bowlers when England was bowled out in the 2nd innings of the 1st test and then they opened the innings for Proteas. Is it a unique event in test cricket when both the opening bowlers were the last two bowlers to finish opponents innings?
It's quite rare, when circumstances are exactly as described. At Chittagong in 2009, Imrul Kayes and Tamim Iqbal bowled the last two overs of an innings against Sri Lanka, and then opened the batting immediately afterwards. However they did not bowl the opposition out; there was a declaration. There are one or two similar cases in the last 20 years, where an innings ended in a declaration. There are one or two other occasions where a pair of opening batsmen bowled the last two overs of an innings, but these were last two overs of a drawn match.
At Rawalpindi in 1994, Taylor and Slater bowled the last two overs in Pakistan's second innings and then opened. In this case, Pakistan was bowled out. I can't find any other cases in the last 30 years and 1200 Test matches.
Slater, who took the last wicket in that innings, bowled only 4.1 overs in his whole Test career.
Longest wait to complete an over in a Test: A couple of extreme cases were very recent. Against Bangladesh last year, Dale Steyn waited 4 days to finish an over. However, he never did finish it as the match was washed out. For bowlers who did eventually complete their over, Josh Hazlewood waited three days in the Sydney Test just a couple of weeks ago. Hazlewood's over was interrupted at about 1:40 pm, so he had to wait about 2 hours short of a full three days. Chris Martin also waited until the third day at Johannesburg in 2000, but his over was interrupted at 6:26 pm and restarted at 10:45.
Tony MacGibbon waited 4 days,
including a rest day, at Dunedin in 1955, but when play restarted, England
declared, so he didn't complete the over.
CA Roach WI v Eng, Georgetown, Guyana 1930
DG Bradman Aus v Ind, Adelaide Oval 1947/48
DCS Compton Eng v Pak, Nottingham (Trent Bridge) 1954
NJ Astle NZ v Eng, Christchurch 2001/02
MS Dhoni Ind v Aus, Chennai (Chepauk) 2012/13
BA Stokes SAf v Eng, Cape Town 2015/16
A recent research trip to New Zealand met with some success. A total of eight Test match scores were found that were previously thought lost, one from Christchurch and seven linear scores from Auckland between 1967 and 1981.
I also photographed more than 120 original scores of ODIs form the 1990s. I now have over 300 such scores from prior to the Cricinfo era and hope someday to extend back in time ball-by-ball knowledge of one-dayers.
18 December, 2015
Re-writing some Slow-Moving Records
Most of the records for slowest scoring Tests date from many years ago, with few recent additions. It seemed to be getting less and less likely that such records would be much added to, what with the modern game dominated by flat-track bullies using super bats on shrunken grounds.
But then the South Africans came along with an innings of 143 in 143.1 overs at the Delhi FSK ground. The only real parallel was India's 187 off 185 overs at Bridgetown in 1962. The details of the South African innings challenge and sometimes even surpass anything from olden times. Hashim Amla's 25 off 244 balls (10.25 R/100 b) and AB de Villiers 43 off 297 (14.48 R/100b) rival anything from earlier times.
Here are some other slow innings in the same range, not on Cricinfo:
8.97 Hanif Mohammad (20 off 223 balls) Lord's 1954
11.76 HL Collins (40 off 340) The Oval 1921
12.36 WH Scotton (34 off 275) The Oval 1886.
Bizarre to think that de Villiers started off the year by hitting a century off 31 balls in an ODI, more than twenty times faster than his Delhi marathon.
Fewest runs by individuals in a complete session (minimum two hours, 24 overs)
4 (90 balls) MD Crowe (19*), Colombo 1983 Day 5, Session 2
5 (78 balls) Arshad Khan (9*), Colombo 2000, Day 3, Session 2
6 (113 balls) HM Amla (25), Delhi 2015, Day 4, Session 2
7 (124 balls) AC Bannerman (41), Melbourne 1892, Day 3, Session 2*
8 (~135 balls) B Mitchell (58), Brisbane 1931, Day 5
8 (93 balls) MC Cowdrey (27), Lord's 1956, Day 4, Session 3
8 CPS Chauhan (79), Kanpur 1979, Day 1, Session 1
8 (99 balls) RC Russell (29*), Johannesburg 1995, Day 5, Session 2
8 (49 balls) GA Gooch (84), The Oval 1988, Day 3, Session 1
*possibly less than 2 hours, but about 45 overs were bowled.
TE Bailey scored 8 in 121 minutes (135 balls) after lunch on Day 5, Leeds 1955. The match ended when he was out.
WR Playle scored 2 runs off 110 balls before lunch, Day 5, Leeds 1958, batting for all but 2 balls of the session.
PI Pocock scored 7 runs in a session of 31 overs but less than 2 hours, Georgetown 1968.
SCJ Broad (6) scored just 2 runs in the first two hours of an extended session, Auckland 2013, Day 5 Session 3. He was out before the end of the session.
Danny Morrison scored 7 runs off 68 balls in a session of
about 2 hours but only 21 overs at Faisalabad 1990/91.
Chris Tavare scored 18 runs in two sessions (9+9) at Chennai in 1982. The sessions were 90 and 120 minutes.
62 Amla and de Villiers, 3rd wicket, SAf v Ind, Delhi 2015
58 Rabone and Poore, 6th wicket, NZ v SAf Durban 1953/54
58 Hanif Mohammad and Waqar Hassan, 2nd wicket, Pak v Eng Lord's 1954
53 Edrich and Parkhouse, 5th wicket, Eng v WI Lord's 1950
51 Younis Khan and Azhar Ali, 2nd wicket, Pak v SL Sharjah 2011
This is very much a "where known" record.
Most balls faced to reach double figures…
These are figures from the bbb
database only (73% of Tests), and I have not hazarded any guesses for innings
outside that set. Putting this together was occasioned by the discovery of
the Turner innings, which included a stretch of 58 balls on a score of 6; the
Auckland 1968/69 Test scoresheets were among a recent find from a recent
research trip to New Zealand. Some of the other figures are uncertain, due to
imprecise placement of byes and leg byes in the originals. The Moses figure
is from an over-by-over analysis only.
The innings by the 'dashing' Compton is a surprise.
I have added two new record categories to the Unusual Records files: slowest teams to reach 50 and 100. In the latter, the Delhi marathon beats all comers, with previous records being clustered around the 'funereal' period of the fifties and early sixties.
This is a difficult area to nail down definitively, because many extreme cases tend to come from an era that is poorly represented by detailed data. However, I have done as much checking as possible, and I think there would be few cases that escape notice completely. Estimates of some sort are possible in most cases where scorebooks or other exact data are not available. Here is a part of the tables…
Balls estimated for Engineer: 30-35. Times do not include
change of innings or breaks in play. Dowlin and Surti's dismissals were in different sessions; Iddon's and Trumper's were on
different days, almost 24 hours later in Trumper's
case, in a heavily rain-affected match.
Reaching ODI century with a six:
Since 1999, de Villiers has 6, with Gibbs, Kallis and Jayasuriya on 3. Kallis and Jayasuriya could have one or two more before 1999, but there is no bbb data and no mention in Wisden reports.
When Jayasuriya reached 100 off 48 balls in Singapore in 1996 and hit 11 sixes, he reached 100 with a single.
Teams with most captains: in 1996, Pakistan regularly fielded ODI teams with six past or present captains. The first occasion was at Old Trafford.
SInce then, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka have also fielded six; Sri Lanka did so in the World Cup against Australia this year.
The only team with seven was (technically) a 'World XI' at MCG in 2005. Their opponents, an 'Asian XI' had six, making 13 in all in the match.
Only one maiden was bowled on the first day of the first Test against New Zealand (Australia 416 for 2). When Australia scored 494 in a day against South Africa in 1910, there were no maidens in the first 85 overs, but the day finished with five in 99 overs.
There were no maidens on the first day at Durban in 1938/39 (third Test, not the 10-day Test) in 76 overs. However, they were 8-ball overs, so it was harder to bowl maidens.
There were only 2 maidens in 87.3 overs on the first day of the Kolkata Test of 2011 (India/West Indies).
A question on Ask Steven: In NZ's domestic T20 competition, Canterbury Kings fielder Peter Fulton took 5 outfield catches and their wicketkeeper Cameron Fletcher took 5 dismissals also. Has it happened previously that two fielders have accounted for all 10 dismissals in any innings in any first class format?
I can find a grand total of one previous case that meets the criteria, Griqualand West v Easterns in 2001
In a couple of others, the dismissals were shared between 2 fielders but the keeper took nearly all of them. That's it for all of senior cricket.
At the other end of the scale, here's an innings where 10 catches were taken by 10 different fielders.
27 November 2015
A few occasional notes
Victorian opener Travis Dean now has a first-class average. After becoming the first batsman in first-class history to make unbeaten twin centuries on debut, he then scored 84 and 19 when he next batted. When he was out for 84 his first-class average stood at 347.0. This was the highest average on record, at the end of an innings, in all of first-class cricket (previously 325.0 by W Jaffer, and 320.0 by PS Clifford). His average briefly reached 366 just before he was out for 19 in the second innings. The highest (transient) averages ever reached are
392.0 SJE Loxton 1947 (232*, 73, 87)
389.0 HO Rock 1925 (127, 27*, 235)
371.0 Jiwanjot Singh 2012 (213, 158)
366.0 TJ Dean 2015 (154*, 109*, 84, 19)
354.0 W Jaffer 1997 (11, 314*, 29)
The most consecutive ducks in f-c cricket that I can find is six, by several players, including Albert Wright of South Australia in 1905-06, who did so in the first six innings of his career.
VHD Cannings, W Worsley. RR
Richards and IM Kidson made six consecutive ducks
and 7 consecutive 0s including one 0 not out.
RR Richards
IM Kidson
AP Sedara
Mark Robinson of Yorkshire failed to score in 12 consecutive innings, seven of them not out.
Michael Jones wrote today that Pakistan has two current players named Imran Khan. One of them has played 7 Tests, the other 3 T20is... and yet neither has scored a run.
First scoring shot in Tests a six: here's some players, not necessarily a complete list (but mostly complete, I think)
EW Freeman (second ball)
Al-Amin Hossain*
CA Best
DM Richards
Jahurul Islam
KM Dabengwa
MD Craig (first ball faced)
*not on debut: he failed to score in his first Test.
JH Sinclair apparently cleared the boundary with his first scoring shot in 1896, but at the time the shot only counted for four.
Some early declarations in f-c cricket
4/2 Glamorgan v Worcestershire, Worcester 1935
17/3 Glamorgan v Hampshire, Bournemouth 1981
23/4 Middlesex v Yorkshire, Leeds 1906
26/5 Eagles v Dolphins, Durban 2008/09
21/6 Glamorgan v Notts, Cardiff 1924
24/7 Windward Is v Leeward Is, Roseau, Nov 2015
43/8 Cambridge U v Warwickshire, Cambridge 1953
44/9 Sussex v Gloucestershire, Cheltenham 1968
44/9 Victoria v WA, Melbourne 1975/76
Previously the earliest declaration with 7 wickets down
was 32/7 – in a Test match, Aus v Eng Brisbane 1950/51.
Test centuries with strike rate greater than a run per ball from the very first ball:
Dismissed on
overnight score…
In total, it appears to have happened to Misbah five times, including the two in the current match. Four of those have been in the last 12 months.
I calculate six each for Chris Cairns and Jacques Kallis. MIsbah joins DBL
Powell, RS Dravid, MA Atherton and GA Gooch on
Martin Snedden scored a three-day duck at Trent Bridge in 1990. He was 0 not out on the first day and again on the second (only 5 overs were bowled), then out for 0 off 29 balls on the third morning.
The highest score by a batsman dismissed on his overnight score is 223 by Bradman in 1930/31. The thousands who turned up to see Bradman continue his double-century were not best pleased. Clyde Walcott (152) was run out as non-striker on the first ball of the second day at Delhi in 1948. Conrad Hunte, on debut, batted right through his first day of Test cricket, but was out for 142 first ball next day (Bridgetown 1958).
A reader on the Ask Steven Facebook page noted that in a recent Australia A v India A match in Chennai, Gurinder Sandhu Took wickets by all available means: bowled, caught, lbw, stumped and hit wicket. In modern cricket, this is a rare event. I appears that it hasn't happened in a Test match, which is a bit of a surprise. In f-c cricket, there are quite a few cases (more than 100), but there are very few in recent times.[It seems that hit wicket was more common long ago than it is now, so fewer bowlers get all five. Stumping is also less common.]
The most recent prior case that I found (and this is a case of all five in one innings) was BGK Walker in this match in 1998.
29 October 2015
A Very Long Wait Indeed
Most Balls Bowled Before First Wicket in a Test Innings
Zulfiqar Babar of Pakistan gave this record a good shake in the recent Test in Abu Dhabi. Zulfiqar finished with figures of 72-17-183-1.
*8-ball overs. Italics indicate timeless Tests.
Verity took two wickets in his last over of that innings in 1939, having previously gone wicketless for the equivalent of 73 overs.
Figures that are undetermined include:
>350? DR Doshi Auckland 1981.
? AB Howard Georgetown 1972
>350? SA Durani Kingston 1962
~350 AV Mankad Peshawar 1955
There may be others, although I doubt if there are any undetermined figures that would rank in the top 6.
At Bridgetown in 1962, Lance Gibbs bowled 225 balls before his first wicket, but finished with 8 for 38.
Most balls in an innings without taking a wicket: 432 By
DS Atkinson (72-29-137-0) at Edgbaston 1957.
179 M Prabhakar, Lord's 1990
166 RK Chauhan, Colombo 1997/98
159 I Sharma Edgbaston 2011
156 PR Adams Johannesburg 1996/97
Chancy Triples
With assistance from Michael Jones and Christopher Hilton's "The 300 Men" I have compiled a list of known chances (catches and stumpings) for batsmen making Test triple centuries.
The most expensive misses can be listed
324 runs: Hutton 364 (stumping)
323 runs: Hanif 337 (unconfirmed)
316 and 307 runs: Taylor 334*
297 runs: Inzamam 329
297 runs: Gooch 333
293 runs: McCullum 302
The results emphasise an element of luck in making huge scores. Depending on how one treats 'technical' chances, only about 21-39% of these batsmen reached 300 without giving a chance. By contrast, about 50% of century-makers reach 100 without any chance (higher if you don't count technical chances).
Many of these innings, possibly a majority of them, also
included misadventures in running between wickets and near run outs, but
these have not been included. The usual caveats apply as to what constitutes
a chance and what does not: opinions will vary, particularly across the
years. Before television, there would be extra uncertainty about some
A couple of intriguing (non-first-class) matches from India, unearthed by Sreeram from the trove in Cricket Archive. One was a timeless university match that lasted for eight consecutive days, with a fourth innings of 611. The other was a schools match with a team innings of 1025, a first innings lead of over one thousand and a margin of an innings and 925 runs. The latter match does not have a full score: it would be most interesting to find one.
I did find the close of play scores in the university match:
Bombay was 268/9 on the first day, out for 343 on the second with Delhi 160/2.
Delhi was out for 241 and Bombay (second innings) 99/2 and 501/5 on the 3rd and 4th days.
Bombay was out for 625, setting Delhi 728 to win. Delhi was
125/1 on the 5th day, 343/4 on the 6th, 567/6 on the 7th day, and out for 611
on the eighth day. The two second innings thus spanned six days.
Siva Teja has done some interesting
work on the geography of international cricket grounds. He found two grounds
that are virtually antipodean to one another: Whangarei in New Zealand and
Tangier in Morocco, some 20,020 kilometres apart. The closest two that still
exist are the two grounds in Quetta, Pakistan, which are across the road from
one another. Only a handful of internationals have been played there.
The cities (pop 100,000+) that are most distant from any
international ground are Honolulu, Hawaii (from Whangerei)
and Punta Arenas, Chile (from Georgetown, Guyana).
The official paid attendance on the final day at Adelaide Oval in 1967/68 was 17. India was already 9 down, and only 6 overs were bowled. This is the lowest non-zero attendance figure for a Test day in my database.
16 October 2015
I have updated the "Hot 100" list, the
fastest-scoring and slowest-scoring batsmen in Test cricket. I do this about
once a year. It is a characteristic of most batsmen that their scoring rates
change from year to year much less than their batting averages, so there has
been only slow change in the rankings. The notable movers are Brendon
McCullum, up eight places after a stellar year, and Shakib
al Hasan of Bangladesh.
[Note that, due to a subtle error, Chris Gayle and a couple of others were left off last year's list.]
The list of batsmen reaching an ODI century off the last
possible ball has been updated (19
August 2015). At Kanpur, AB de Villers
became only the fifth confirmed case of achieving this with a six: Mohammad Yousuf (twice), Kevin Pietersen
UPDATE UPDATE. Rajneesh Gupta
adds the following:
-Javed Miandad did so in a 43-over game (Pak v WI, Georgetown, 1988)
-One more ball was bowled in Zimbabwean innings after Sikandar Raza reached his hundred off a no-ball. Raza lost the strike while taking the single to complete his hundred.
-Ramiz Raja was out obstructing the field on 99 while going for the second run (which would have taken him to his 100) in a 44-over game (Pak v Eng, Karachi, 1987).
I wrote some time ago that the first batsman to hit sixes
off consecutive balls was Warwick Armstrong at the MCG in 1908. There is, however,
an earlier example. JJ Lyons, at the Oval in 1893, hit five consecutive balls
faced for four (two off Briggs and three off Lockwood. He was out next ball).
The last two hits, although they only counted four at the time, cleared the
boundary and would be regarded as sixes today. The first of these hits "he
drove straight to the roof of the pavilion, the ball bounding over." That was
one mighty hit, perhaps exceeding 115 metres.
Runner run out in Tests, where known (Batsman given out
named, runner in brackets)
Steve Waugh was run out only four times in Tests, and it
turns out that one of those involved his runner. Waugh's partners were run
out on 23 occasions.
MacLeod and Jones were run out after being bowled by the no ball, but left the crease not hearing the call, and thinking they were out. Macleod was nearly deaf, and his run out has to be described as "just not cricket, old chap".
In his 245 in the Test at Abu Dhabi, Shoaib
Malik made scoring shots for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. I have records of about 60
other cases, but there are probably a couple of dozen others not recorded.
The smallest score to include all these shots is 39 by EA Brandes
for Zimbabwe at Auckland in 1996. No one has added a 7 to the complete set,
although Andrew Sandham scored both a five and a
seven in his 325 in 1930. However, he hit no sixes.
Since 2000, I have logged the following numbers of slip catches off pace bowlers in Tests...
keeper 3184
1st slip 696
2nd slip 707
3rd slip 266
4th slip 26
gully 540
"Slip" 449
These are from text descriptions, which are sometimes imprecise.
"Slip" means that the exact position was not specified
in texts or reports. While 2nd slip gets more catches in the above table, I
would expect that a large majority of catches at "Slip" were
actually 1st slip. Some recorders do not mention a slip number if only one
slip is in place.
Most expensive overs with no boundaries or extras…
There was an 8-ball over at SCG 1963/64 that went 0,3,2,3,3,0,2,2 = 15 runs. Peter Pollock bowling, O'Neill and Lawry facing.
There was a 6-ball over at Lord's 1982 that went 3,3,1,3,0,2 = 12 runs. Doshi bowling, Randall and Botham facing.
This is "Where Known". There could be others.
In the recent Colombo Test, Ishant Sharma, in his 65th Test, was the most experienced player in the match, at the young age of 26. This is unusual but not unprecedented. At Karachi 1959, Garry Sobers (25th Test) was the most experienced player at age 22. At Rawalpindi in 1997, Waqar Younis, age 25 in his 45th Test, was the most experienced. Mohammad Ashraful was the most experienced player at age 25 against West Indies in 2009, in Tests where the senior West Indies players had gone on strike and had been replaced.
I don't think there are any others before their 26th birthday, except some special cases in the 1800s which I have excluded because nobody had played more than a handful of Tests. Tendulkar played four Tests at age 26 where he was the most experienced player, and Alan Knott played five.
Batsmen involved in run outs: In Tests, I get 29 for Border (12 times out), 27 for Dravid (13 times out) and Steve Waugh (4 times out: in one of those his runner was run out), 26 for Chanderpaul (4 times out). Ponting was involved in only 20 run outs, but was out himself on 15 of those occasions.
Inzamam was run out only six times in Tests, and saw his partner run out ten times.
In ODIs , there is Mohammad Yousuf (79/ 38 times out), SR Waugh (78/ 27), Inzamam (76/ 40) and Tendulkar (76/ 34), Dravid (74/ 40). Atapattu, run out more than any other batsman (41 times), is down the list a bit on 65/ 41.
10 September 2015
Here is some further data on the subject of the follow-on. I also looked at this subject on
17 February 2014 . It occurred to me that a primary factor behind the success of follow-on decisions by captains might be the amount of time left in the match, rather than the runs lead.
So I looked at the outcomes of matches where a follow-on was available, in terms of the stage of the match where the follow-on decision was made. The data in the table covers matches since 1995; Tests involving Bangladesh or Zimbabwe, which have inevitable results, have been excluded.
Win % in follow-on situations, according to session of play
Not surprisingly, the more time is available, the higher the likelihood of winning the match. Leading by over 200 with more than 3 days to play just about guarantees a win, regardless of the decision. However, there are some interesting differences in the outcomes on the third and fourth days.
Enforcing the follow-on: with each successive session, from the beginning of the third day, the Win % declines. The decline is gradual, and enforcing the follow-on on the fourth day still has good positive outcomes.
Not enforcing the follow-on: there are excellent outcomes on the third day, but the success rate plummets on day four.
Bottom line: do not enforce when time is available on the third day, but enforce the follow-on when time is short (day four). Given that follow-on situations arise more frequently on the third day, it is better in general NOT to enforce the follow-on.
Teams not enforcing have a 100% record if the decision comes up before tea on the third day. This is quite remarkable when you think about it; at the very least you would expect the occasional such Test to be washed out, but no trailing team in the last 20 years has managed to recover from this, if asked to bowl again.
There is some surprise in this data, in that it runs counter to the observation that it is easier to win a Test by wickets than runs if time is an issue, because you only need to score one extra run for a wickets win. The tiring of a bowling attack when the follow-on is enforced seems to be a very important factor.
Shane Watson has retired from Tests after a successful if oddly unsatisfying career. One aspect of his play that has received negative comment are claims that Watson overused the DRS system, and asked for too many improbable reviews of LBW decisions. This is something that can be checked with stats.
There have now been more than 150 Tests that used the DRS system. In those Tests, on-field umpires have made 781 lbw decisions (initially) against batsmen. Batsmen have challenged those lbw decisions a remarkable 459 times, 59% of the time. For top order batsmen, the percentage is even higher, about 65%.
Decisions were overturned in the batsman's favour 126 times, representing 27.5% of the reviews (about 29% for top-order batsmen).
So how does Watson compare to other batsmen? He was given out lbw (initially, on-field) 15 times, which places him third after Alistair Cook (19) and Brendon McCullum (16). Watson challenged eleven of those decisions, so his percentage of 73% is indeed higher than the typical top order batsman. In two out of the eleven challenges, the decision was overturned, or 18%, which is rather lower than the 29% of other similar batsmen. The sample size getting quite small here, so don't read too much into those last figures.
Nevertheless, this is evidence that Watson did overuse the system, but not radically so. I would say that the data does not strongly support the complaint, given that half of all batsmen will, by definition, have more than average number of challenges, so Watson has plenty of company. One other factor is that Watson was more prone to lbw than most other batsmen, so the review situation arose more often, and so attracted more notice. Watson was also subjected to lbw reviews by bowling teams more often than any other batsman: 17 times, ahead of Ian Trott on 16. Only two of these resulted in overturns, and Watson's dismissal.
Watson has not been the leading challenger of decisions: Misbah-ul-Haq has challenged 13 out of 14 decisions against him, with three overturns. Curiously, Alistair Cook has challenged only seven out of 19 lbw decisions against him, with two overturns.
Top Order Batsmen Making their Maiden First-Class Century in a Test match.
It has happened occasionally with Zimbabwe players like GW Flower, BRM Taylor and AG Cremer, and some Bangladeshis.
But in the last 30 years I daresay the most prominent player who meets the criteria is (believe it or not) Kumar Sangakkara. Sangakkara's maiden first-class century came in his 10th Test match; it was his 50th first-class match and 76th innings. Remarkable. He played 103 innings before making a first-class century that was not in a Test match, and 140 innings before doing so in Sri Lanka.
Perhaps 20 players from the last 30 years also fit. Most of them ore not particularly prominent, but Salman Butt had a highest score of 60 and only one fc half-century (average 13.7) when he opened for Pakistan v Bangladesh in 2003.
David Warner, of course, played for Australia before he played first-class cricket, but that was in T20. He had a few fc centuries by the time he played Tests.
Here's something I noticed while reading some reports of Tests in 1888. It is relevant to the little mystery why most countries refer to a cricket score as, say, 100 for 4 (runs-first), whereas in Australia it is 4 for 100 (wickets-first).
I appears that in the 19th Century, reports in England generally used the wickets-first style (at least in The Times). By 1907-1912, this style had changed in most cases to the runs-first style. In between, in 1902, both forms seem to have been in use. In one 1902 report (third Test, first day), both styles are used in the same paragraph.
It would appear that the Australian style is the retained original (or archaic) style, and that the English moved away from it in the early 20th Century. The original style is still seen in bowling figures, which are still given wickets-first everywhere, as are falls of wicket on standard scorecards.
I have records of about 80 cases of bowlers bowling consecutive wides, but Mitchell Starc at Trent Bridge is the first to do it in both innings of one Test. Guy Whittall did it twice in the same innings against India at Harare in 2001.
Mohsin Kamal bowled three consecutive wides to Mark Taylor at Rawalpindi in 1994, as did RJ Peterson to Alex Doolan at Centurion in 2014, and MB Owens of New Zealand at Moratuwa in 1992/93.
This data covers only about 80% of Tests.
In another remarkable Test, Sri Lanka defeated India at Galle even though they were five wickets down and still trailing in the third innings of the match. Apart from the immortal Headingley 1981 Test, when England were still behind with seven down, I found only three other teams that were behind with five down in the third innings and who went on to win the match: Colombo 92, Hamilton 93 and Sydney 94. These Tests are oddly clustered together but I don't think there are others.
None of these other three were as far behind with five down as Sri Lanka in the recent match.
19 August 2015
Here are a couple of recent published articles. From the excellent Between Wickets journal, Winter 2015.
Cricket Fatalities Some shocking historical statistics on the number of people killed playing cricket. This is a subject covered previously in the blog, with some extra information.
Jackschon, Fergie and the Genesis of Advanced Cricket Scoring. The story of the pioneers of advanced scoring techniques, which are so ubiquitous in the modern game. (edited version).
If You Thought You had Never Seen Such a Collapse…
You were right. Australia's loss of five wickets in the first 4.1 overs of the Trent Bridge Test was unprecedented, not only on the first morning of a Test match, but in any Test innings. The 25 balls bowled beat the old mark of 28 balls by India (6 runs, 5 wickets) at The Oval in 1952. Even Bangladesh's worst – 29 balls at Harare in 2004 – was no match.
Earliest Fall of Wickets in Test Innings
* 4-ball overs
Australia was all out before lunch for 60, with just 39 runs coming off the bat. Those 39 runs represents the worst showing by Australia's batsmen since 1902, bowled out for 36 (33 off the bat) on an unplayable pitch at Edgbaston.
Stuart Broad (8 for 15) made a mess of all previous records for bowling on the first morning of a Test. I have updated various sections of the "Unusual Records" that were affected by this assault. Note that most of the other entries of this type involved at least some tail-end batsmen. The most astonishing aspect of Broad's demolition is that it involved so many top order batsmen.
Incidentally, England's declaration before lunch on the second day is unprecedented for a team batting second, with the exception of one Zimbabwe Test.
Reaching 100 on the last possible ball of a (full length) ODI innings (UPDATED)
*reached century with a six.
There are possibly one or two others in early ODIs that
have been overlooked, but unlikely. Pietersen is
the only one to do it in the second innings; not surprisingly, he hit the
winning runs with the same ball. McMillan and Williamson benefited from a second
crack at the last ball because the bowler bowled a no ball.
At Wellington in 2001/02 (NZ v Bangladesh), play on the fourth day did not end until 8:06 pm local time. This is the latest stumps time that I have recorded for a Test match day. Play had been washed out on the previous day, and did not start until 1:00 pm on the day in question. Even so, 88 overs were bowled in the day.
There was a period in the late 90 and early 2000s when day
lengths were very flexible when making up lost time, and days could run up to
7.5 hours play or even more. Eventually (by 2005) this was limited to a
maximum 7 hours – or 6.5 hours, if no time had been lost – with maximum 30
minutes extension at start and finish in most countries. I think that play in
England never starts early, but can extend 60 minutes at the end of the day
to make up lost time.
The most balls bowled between wickets by an individual bowler in Tests is 952 balls by Maurice Tate spread over two series in 1929.
A Queensland medium pacer named Alfred Ryan went wicketless for more than 1112 balls in fc cricket in 1936. Can't say the exact number, or if it is the record, but it seems to be the only case of more than a thousand if you just look at complete innings.
A search for most boundaries conceded in a Test produced an interesting result. Brett Lee conceded 44 boundaries at the SCG in 2003/04. Next highest is 42 by Jason Krezja on debut at Nagpur, John Gleeson at Port Elizabeth in 1970, and Tim Southee at Lord's just last May.
Lee also has most in an innings with 35, equal with Bill O'Reilly at Old Trafford in 1934.
There are some other possible candidates for which there is no data, but most of the 'most likely' cases have been covered. That includes cases like OC Scott in 1930, Fleetwood-Smith in 1938, and Fazal Mahmood & Khan Mohammad in 1958, all of whom conceded fewer boundaries than the above. Sri Lanka's 952 in 1997 is also covered.
5 August 2015
New Membership of the 400 Club
I know this has been talked about elsewhere, but here is a simple table of the bowlers who have reached 400 wickets in Tests. There are various ways of comparing a bowler's importance. Wickets per match (the normal metric in this case) is one, but runs conceded and balls bowled also provide interesting comparison.
Stats for the 400th Wicket
Figures as they stood at the taking of the 400th wicket. (Hadlee's runs conceded is not precise, and may be ± 5 or 10.) Number of years figures are rounded.
The increasing frequency of Test matches is reflected in Hadlee's third position in number of matches, but 13th in time taken.
Virender Sehwag hit a boundary from his first ball 25 times in Tests, and leads the field ahead of Sangakkara on 18.
In ODIs, Sehwag (25) is behind Shahid Afridi (27+). Data is incomplete for Afridi, due to lack of data before 1999. Dilshan is next on 23.
In T20i, Mohammad Hafeez leads with 10.
In total, Sehwag on 53, leads Dilshan on 46, Sangakkara on 40, and Afridi on 39+.
Data since 1999 is not absolutely complete for ODI and T20i, but will be close to complete.
For first ball of team innings in Tests, GC Smith (10)
leads Sehwag (5). Sehwag
often batted at #2 in Tests. Gambhir (8), Gayle (6)
and Trescothick (7) are also ahead of Sehwag. In ODI, Sehwag (20)
leads Watson and Gilchrist each on 10.
I had a look for Test series that contained 2 consecutive Tests that were decided in the last possible hour of the match. For 5-day Tests since the War all I found was
1978/79 Pakistan v India Lahore and Karachi
1985/86 Australia v New Zealand Perth and Sydney
1993/94 Pakistan v Zimbabwe Karachi and Rawalpindi
The 2015 New Zealand Tests in England may qualify, but I believe that there was more than one hour available for play in the second match.(UPDATE: there were 19.1 overs to play, and the day ended at 4:55.)
Last year two consecutive Tests in England (v Sri Lanka) had very close finishes but one was drawn.
This is tricky to research so if anyone can think of others let me know.
A Somerset wicketkeeper named Seymour Clark in 1930 had a complete first-class career of 9 innings, 2 not out, 0 runs, avge 0.00. He never bowled either, but he did take eight catches.
A fellow named Faisal Yasin has failed to score in his last 11 first-class innings. His career started with 2, 1* and 1* in his first 3 innings, but his batting went downhill from there, with just 1 run in his last 14 innings. He has a respectable bowling average of 32, so he may yet play again.
In the 2011 Georgetown Test (West Indies/Pakistan), there were 30 dismissals that required an umpire's decision. There were 20 lbws, five caught behind, three caught at short leg, one run out, and one catch at second slip that required a third umpire decision. This appears to be the most 'appeal dismissals' in a Test match. Billy Bowden exercised that crooked finger sixteen times. There were six dismissals, not given on the field, where the OUT decision came from 'upstairs', and 17 reviews requested by the players (four were overturns).
I have assumed here that the majority of bowled and caught dismissals in Tests do not involve an umpire decision.
9 July 2015
I have been away for a few weeks, including a brief visit to England to visit family. I have posted a picture I took of a cricket match, which shows cricket as it is perhaps meant to be. A lovely setting and village green atmosphere. The bowler is my brother, still bowling fast(ish) at age 55. At mid-off is his son, also a quickish bowler. The match was at Wells, Somerset. One modern aspect: it was a Twenty20 game that started at 6:30 pm and still finished before sunset. You can't do that everywhere.
The Longest Overs
I have compiled a list of the longest single overs in the database, those with more than 10 deliveries. It is restricted to six-ball overs; there are quite a number of eight-ball overs that qualify, but I have excluded those. None of those eight-ball overs had more than 12 deliveries.
Most Deliveries in a Six-Ball Over, where known
The two appearances by Ambrose occurred in the same innings. The Sparling over was all legal deliveries, and was thanks to a severe miscount by the umpire. Most of these overs are concentrated in the time after the front-foot no ball rule, but before the decline in no ball counting in this century (partly because some umpires don't seem to bother much with watching for no balls any more). Still, it is surprising that no cases since 1997 can be found.
I have not included the two 'double overs' known in Test cricket (Armstrong in 1921 and Moir in 1950/51), where a bowler was mistakenly allowed to bowl two consecutive overs before and after a break.
There are a
number of other cases where a bowler bowled a full over to end an innings and
then bowled the first over when a follow-on was enforced. Merv
Hughes did this twice. Technically, the most consecutive balls bowled by the
same bowler in Tests was 17 by Ray Lindwall in 1946/47. He finished one Test (the third in
Melbourne) with a nine-delivery over (eight balls plus one no ball) and
started the next Test with an eight-ball over.
The unfortunate batsmen dismissed on the seventh ball of an over were Dale Steyn and Kemar Roach.
Mohammad Azharuddin played a total of four Tests during his career with no batting or bowling or keeping. He took a catch in one of them. Hendren and Mahanama also had 3 Tests without batting, bowling or taking a catch.
Mark Boucher played 11 Tests during his career where he didn't bat or bowl. He kept wickets and took catches in all of them.
Here is a list of first-class matches in which a batsman was left stranded on 99* when the captain declared the innings closed. Some data from Aslam Siddiqui…
M Howell, Free Foresters v Oxford U, Oxford, 1934
(was captain)
GOB Allen, Free Foresters v Oxford U, Oxford, 1952
(captain - ERT Holmes)
P Bainbridge, Gloucestershire v Kent, Bristol, 1983
(captain - D Graveney)
TN Lazard, W Province v N Transvaal, Cape Town, 1988-89
(captain - AP Kuiper)
CEB Rice, Transvaal v W Province, Cape Town, 1990-91
(was captain)
NR Taylor, Kent v Nottinghamshire, Nottingham, 1995
(captain - MR Benson)
M Klinger, Victoria v Tasmania, Hobart, 2000-01
(captain - PR Reiffel)
G Welch, Derbyshire v Somerset, Taunton, 2005
(captain - LD Sutton)
JWH Makepeace, Sussex v Lancashire, Eastbourne 1907 (AC MacLaren)
JG Dewes, Combined Services v Indians, Portsmouth 1946 (JGW Davies)
WR Endean, Western Province v Transvaal, Cape Town 1950/51 (EAB Rowan)
WGA Parkhouse, Glamorgan v Essex, Newport 1952 (W Wooller)
LF Outschoorn, Worcestershire v Glamorgan, Dudley 1954 (RE Bird)
HL Johnson, Sussex v Derbyshire, Worthing 1961 (DB Carr)
P Willey, Somerset v Northamptonshire, Taunton 1970 (RM Prideaux)
H Gidwani, Delhi v Punjab, Delhi 1976/77 (BS Bedi)
SM Davies, Gloucestershire v Worcestershire, Cheltenham 2008 (VS Solanki)
For Willey, Klinger and Makepeace, it was their highest fc score at the time, although all went on to make centuries later. Klinger's team actually lost the match. Incidentally, Bainbridge (who had prior centuries) had been out for 99 in his previous match, five days earlier. In his 99*, he failed to score off his last 7 deliveries with a declaration impending.
Since the early 1960s, it has been the Australian custom for the opening pair to exchange the #1 and #2 positions in the second innings, so there is no favouring of one position or the other for any opener. (There are some exceptions, including Simon Katich.) For Australia since 1961, the #1 position has averaged 41.1 and the #2 has averaged 40.7 - virtually no difference.
England and other countries have tended to give the more senior batsman first ball, so there is a tendency for #1 to have a better average than #2.
20 May 2015
Dropped Catches Report for 2014
I have completed a survey of missed chances mentioned in Cricinfo commentary texts for Tests in 2014, including a few in early 2015 before the World Cup. As in earlier years, I looked for all possible references to dropped or missed catches and missed stumpings. "Technical" and "half" chances were included, as were any incidents reported where a fielder failed to reach a catch but should have.
The surveys now extend across 15 years and more than 600 Tests.
There was a surprise result. After trending slowly down for some time and reaching a new low of 25% missed chances in 2013, the incidence of misses jumped up to 27.5% in 2014-15. Part of this was due to the more Tests for Zimbabwe (with their poor catching), but mostly it is a bit of a mystery. There is always the possibility that the search protocols are unreliable, but it is hard to see why, and I can't really test that.
A critical change was a leap in the number of catches missed by Australia. An incidence of 19% in 2013/14, the best one-year result for a team since I have been doing the surveys, soared to 27% in 2014/15. This is rather baffling, but I think it is consistent with my impression, that Australian fielders were dropping a lot more catches than usual in series against Pakistan and India. Super-reliable hands like David Warner started recording some drops, usually in the 'very hard' class.
Anyway here are some figures by country
Beneficiary of the year was Kane Williamson, missed five times, including a stumping, during his 242* against Sri Lanka (actually in Jan 2015 but included here). This equals the luck of Blignaut (84*) in 2005, Amla (253) in 2010, and Taufeeq Umar (135) in 2011.
The most expensive miss was a "relatively easy" chance at silly mid-on when Brendon McCullum was on 9 at Wellington. He went on to make 302. The fielder was Kohli, the bowler Mohammed Shami. The 293-run gap is just shy of the 297-run benefit enjoyed by Inzamam-ul-Haq (329, dropped on 32) in 2002.
MS Dhoni added seven more misses to his career during the year, and now leads the 21stcentury with 66. Alastair Cook (56) has now edged past Rahul Dravid (55) to lead among non-keepers. Cook's tally includes 17 misses at short leg, the most difficult fielding position.
Parallels: Australia's drop rate in 2014/15 was 27.5%. The rate recorded for Australia in Bill Frindall's scores from 1975 to 1977 was 27.6%.
Batsman missed most times in 2014/15: M Vijay 11, K Sangakkara 10.
Most runs scored after being missed in 2014/15 (totals): BB McCullum 1055, KS Williamson 855. Surprisingly, McCullum's figure is not the highest since I have been collecting data: Mohammad Yousuf benefited from missed chances to the tune of 1116 runs in 2006. [These figures treat all drops as separate and additive, so that the 'runs cost' in a single individual innings can exceed the size of the innings if, say, a batsman is dropped twice early in his innings.]
Bowlers suffering most missed catches: HMRKB Herath 16, NM Lyon 14. Spin bowlers often lead in this category: there are various reasons, including the number of chances at short leg catches and c&b, which have very high drop rates, and the difficulty wicketkeepers have in taking chances off spinners, and effecting stumpings.
Fielders with most misses: BJ Haddin and Mushfiqur Rahim with 11. Note that for 18 of the 353 misses, the name of the fielder was not recorded.
There are no cases of a Test in a series beginning the next day after after another ended. There are 34 cases of one day off in between; the last time it happened was the 1st and 2nd Tests of Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka in 1994/95.
In 1956 Australia played Tests in and against two different countries (Pakistan and India) with only one day off in between. One was on a matting wicket and the other on turf. They had a sequence four Tests and 18 days play with only four days off, and it would have been only three days off except that one Test finished a day early. This happened during a period when there were no Tests at all in Australia for four years. Strange.
In 1961/62 England and Pakistan went 85 days between two Tests of the same series. England played five Tests in India in between.
24 April 2015
A "Burlesque Cricket Match"
On the occasion of the ANZAC (25 April 1915) Centenary…
Just today I read a remarkable document, unearthed by my cousin Kath from the massive archives of the Australian War Memorial. It describes a rest and recreation spell in the midst of the Great War. It is from the 5th Australian Field Ambulance Brigade, who after a hard slog in the forward trenches, was granted 14 days relief in June 1918.
It highlights the importance of sport, particularly cricket, in maintaining morale, and perhaps even sanity, in these extreme circumstances. No fewer than 40 cricket matches were played. We see sport and cricket as a valuable therapy, a way of holding on to humanity in what must have been an insane environment.
I particularly liked the "burlesque cricket match…anyone with any knowledge of cricket was prohibited from playing", and the attempt by Captain H.W.L. Kelly to bat twice, the second time in "camouflage". It appears that the officers and men were equally enthusiastic.
While the drama and sacrifice of the War outside is not by any means the subject, the spirit, and the sense of release, hints at the horrors that they had faced, and would return to.
From a personal
perspective, the greatest interest is in the author, lance-corporal W.N.
(William Norman) Davis, who is in fact my grandfather. This is the first
document of any substance that we have found that was written by him during
his service. Like many of his comrades, he spoke little of his War experience
in later years. As a stretcher bearer venturing out into No Man's Land, we
can barely imagine the things that he saw. He died in 1953, before I was
[I came across a picture (a team photo) of my grandfather as captain of a premiership-winning A Grade Churches Cricket team, St Clement's Marrickville, taken some time in the 1920s. Back then, Churches cricket was a very substantial league. Winning A Grade would have required some pretty good cricketers.]
And here are a few other lines I wrote, also in connection with the
The 24th April 1915
marked the start of the pogroms and massacres of the Armenian community in
Ottoman Turkey. The veil of war brought to a head a long history of
oppression of this (civilian Christian) minority, which reached a frenzied level
later in 1915. The massacres and deportations continued for several years.
The death toll is disputed, but was certainly well over one million, with
many more losing their entire families and escaping with nothing but their
Now I doubt if anyone in the ANZAC front line had any inkling that they might have been helping the Armenians. That was not the aim, but it was an effect. They were fighting for something. While the campaign failed, it was not futile or pointless. Better planning, and seizing the opportunity for victory at Suvla Bay, might have overthrown the Ottomans and turned the war on its head, and saved countless lives.
As awful and evil as war is, there are some things that are even worse. The prevention of such evil is something worth fighting for.
Highest innings in first-class cricket consisting entirely of boundaries (where known). For a time, this was thought to be an innings of 46 by John Emburey in Tasmania in 1986/87. However, here is one case of 52 runs that appears to be off genuine bowling: SHT Kandamby in 2004.
Mark Pettini for
Most series by a captain who won them all is four by Salim Malik, although he was also losing captain in a one-off Test against South Africa.
Notable is Richie Benaud's record: 5 wins, no losses, 1 draw. It is a pity about that draw: Australia would probably have won the series if Benaud had chosen to chase a straightforward target of 242 off about 90 overs in the final Test of 1962/63.
I have excluded one-off Tests. To qualify, the player had to be captain in both the first and last Test of a series.
For the least successful, look no further than Bangladesh.
10 April 2015
Cricket Fatalities: Casting a Wider Net
The death of Philip Hughes was an especially shocking event. Not only did it occur to a batsman wearing the protective gear that has made serious injuries relatively rare, but it had no precedent in Australian first-class cricket, even in the days before helmets.
However, precedents can be found by casting the net wider. On his blog, "Cuts and Glances", Gideon Haigh shared some results of a search of the Trove Australian Newspaper database. Haigh simply searched for articles containing the words "killed", and "cricket ball" and came up with a remarkable number of hits. I extended this search with other combinations (death + cricket + ball, and fatal + cricket + ball), weeded out the duplicates, and compiled some statistics on the results.
As Haigh noted, there is no way of knowing how comprehensive such a survey would be. However, given that all were unusual and tragic events, and the fact that most cases were reported in multiple newspapers, I would expect (and hope, given the numbers) that a majority of cases have been uncovered. Some papers in those days would record all cases emerging from Coroner's reports, and deaths of this type would certainly attract the attention of Coroners.
The number was surprising, even alarming. Over ninety separate cases were found of men, women, and children killed by cricket balls in Australia between 1880 and the 1950s. (The Trove database in its current state peters out after about 1954.) These cases are specific to blows from cricket balls, and do not include death from other causes during cricket matches. There were, incidentally, very few incidents reported during the World Wars; at other times, more than one per year was commonplace.
Some victims were umpires or spectators, but most were players, and most of those were batsmen. While most incidents happened during organised matches, others happened at practice or in people's backyards. In a few cases, the blow may have exacerbated a previously existing health problem, so the blow was only an indirect cause of death.
The most striking feature was how young many of the victims were. Excluding non-participants, the median age was just 18. Half the victims were that age or younger. Thirty-three cases were under 16 years old. Even allowing for their lower skill level in avoiding such blows, it appears that the young may be particularly vulnerable to serious injury when struck. Some of the non-participant victims were also children, as young as eleven months (Annie Denison, killed in her family's backyard in 1894).
About 70 percent had head injuries; most of the others were struck on the chest ("over the heart" is a common phrase). It was notable that at least ten were hit 'behind the ear', presumably like Hughes. There were more fatalities from this type of blow than on the temple (seven). In some 27 other cases, the head injuries were unspecified and without further detail in the reports, so it is very likely that there were more cases similar to the Hughes injury. Perhaps Hughes' fate was not quite so rare as we thought.
In about ten cases, the player was pronounced dead on the field. Most died later; in some cases the seriousness of the injury was not realised at the time. A few of the victims walked off the field, or even walked home. "Don't worry, I'm all right" were among the last words of David Mitchison after being struck in 1933.
Most freakish perhaps was a batsman, Robert Parker, killed by a ball hit from another game on an adjacent ground, at Artarmon in Sydney in 1925. In 1903, the unfortunate A.J. Collins died after being struck on the ankle; he somehow contracted blood poisoning.
We don't have much data since the 1950s, but deaths would certainly have continued in subsequent decades, until protective equipment improved. A friend of Jeff Thomson named Martin Bedkober was killed in a club match in the 1970s.
Haigh also notes that the frequency of these tragedies was
unknown to authorities or any experts who were asked. Unlike the recent
tragedy, these events attracted only fleeting attention, with a few lines of
reportage, and no follow-up. In the few reports where any implications were
discussed, no one seemed aware of more than a handful of prior cases. It was
certainly a surprise to find how many times this happened, and how young the
victims often were.
Substitute Collection
I have put together a complete set of 768 catches by more than 200 substitutes in Tests (up to late 2014). The incidence of "c sub" has waxed and waned over the years. The numbers reached a peak, about one every second Test, in the 1980s and early 90s, coinciding with the peak in batsmen retiring hurt. Since then the numbers have subsided to about one in every four Tests, similar to pre-War rates.
The most catches by substitutes
UDU Chandana effected five catches and three run outs as a substitute.
My recollection of Harper is of one of the very best catchers that I ever saw. He only played 25 Tests, being a spinner in the age of mighty West Indian pace bowlers, so he had few opportunities. He was, not surprisingly, a popular choice for substitute fielder.
Most catches by a player who never made a starting appearance in a Test match is three, by Iqbal Sikander (who did play ODIs for Pakistan) and also Sheldon Gomes, brother of Larry. In all, more than 90 players have taken catches as subs without ever playing in a Test XI. Most of them took only one catch: their appearances were fleeting, it would seem.
I haven't checked thoroughly, but I don't know of anyone who has taken a catch as Test substitute and never played senior cricket. Chris Sabburg, who famously took a sub catch after being on the field for only two balls at the Gabba in 2013, has still not played first-class cricket, although he has appeared for Brisbane Heat in Big Bash cricket. SH Copley, a member of the Trent Bridge ground staff who took a fine catch in 1930 to dismiss Stan McCabe, did play one fc match.
Interesting that the leading Australian 12th men, Andy Bichel (19 times) and Michael Kasprowicz (16), never took any substitute catches. For Australians, being 12th man means fetching and carrying duties only.
There are three instances of a
player taking four substitute catches in one match
Younis Khan's catches were all in the same innings. Gursharan Singh, who made only one full appearance in a Test match, was also credited with a run out in the Test at Ahmedabad. [Note: a case of four sub catches by Chanderpaul at Old Trafford in 1995, as reported by Cricket Archive, is not correct. Two of the catches went to SC Williams. Thanks to Shahzad for the correction.]
As far as I can see, no country has fielded an identical ODI XI more than two years apart. Sri Lanka had identical teams in these two ODIs, 682 days apart...
Sri Lanka used the same XI ten times in 1996, which was the team that won the World Cup.
In Tests, West Indies fielded identical XIs in two Tests 1059 days apart, from 1988 to 1991. The same XI played in nine other Tests in between, giving the most appearances by an identical XI. Of course, West Indies used other combinations in this period as well.
Batsmen making Test centuries after being dropped on 0 (since 2001): AB de Villiers AJ Stewart AN Cook DR Martyn DS Lehmann Habibul Bashar Inzamam-ul-Haq KC Sangakkara KP Pietersen MEK Hussey ML Hayden SR Tendulkar RT Ponting.
Hayden and Inzamam appear twice. The highest score made by someone dropped on 0 is 270 by Sangakkara at Bulawayo 2004. Tendulkar was dropped on 0 when he made his highest Test score (248*). Hussey (195) was dropped first ball (debatable). de Villiers (164) was also dropped first ball.
[As always, some dropped catches are debatable, and others might not have been recorded.]
Most expensive maiden overs: at Wellington in
1977/78, the first over of the match, bowled by Bob Willis, was a maiden
costing ten runs: eight byes and two no balls.
I did do a calculation recently that in since 2013 teams batting first, for the full 50 overs, reached the halfway score point early in the 32nd over, on average. This is a slight shift from earlier times, where the halfway was indeed about 30 overs.
Victor Trumper once scored 50 runs off nine balls bowled by one bowler. It was in a first grade match in October 1907 (not first-class, but quite a high level) during an innings of 89 in 35 minutes for Paddington v Waverley. The bower was Rose, and the hits were 4,4,6,6,6,6 (in one over) then 6,6,6.
The account is unclear but it seems very likely that Trumper faced ball(s) in between the two overs. Other sources say that Trumper faced ten balls from Rose, with a dot ball in the second over, but the Sydney Mail of 30 October 1907 says explicitly…
"In Rose's following over, Trumper was brought face to face with him at the fourth ball, and he hit three more sixers off the three remaining balls, which gave a total of a half century off nine balls received in succession from Rose."
17 March 2015
RH per 10 Tests
I can find only one case of a bowler taking a wicket, and then losing his own wicket, off consecutive balls in a Test match. At the MCG in 1937, Bill O'Reilly dismissed Hedley Verity to finish off England for 76 on a sticky wicket. He was sent in to bat immediately as a nightwatchman, but fell to the first ball of the innings, c&b Voce. Too bad Voce wasn't the man that O'Reilly had dismissed: that would have been a neat symmetry.
There are various cases of the converse, that is a batsman being out, then taking a wicket with the next ball of the match (first ball of the next innings). That is more common because opening bowlers are often tailenders and so frequently are last man out.
Longest Career without a Man of the Match Award (since 1985)
Moin Khan
PD Collingwood
D Ramdin
ADR Campbell
HAPW Jayawardene
FH Edwards
Habibul Bashar
NR Mongia
Khaled Mashud
DJ Richardson
Saeed Ajmal
IDS Smith
KS More
list of fastest ODI 100s: Some early standards were set by Majid Khan, 100
off 88 balls in ODI #14, and Clive Lloyd, 100 off 82 balls in ODI #33. The
next advance was very likely 100 off 72 by Zaheer
Abbas in ODI #163. That and the rest can be found in Cricinfo's list of fastest 100s.
Reaching a century off the last ball of an ODI innings: It happens occasionally. In 2011, Kane Williamson was 93 with one ball to play, and got his 100 thanks to 4 off a no ball and then 3.
Bravo also reached 100 off the last ball
There are earlier cases.
A wicket with first ball and last ball of an ODI innings:
There is Daryl Tuffey
in 2001
Nuwan Kulasekera took a wicket with the first ball and ran out a batsman with the last ball in 2009. He bowled the last over
Chaminda Vaas did it in this match:
Jim Laker bowled at least 674 balls to Frank Worrell without ever taking his wicket. There is data missing for one Test (Headingley 1957) but Laker probably did very little bowling to Worrell in that match.
Ray Illingworth probably bowled a similar number of balls to Garry Sobers, but data is quite incomplete here.
John Gleeson bowled 639 balls to John Edrich in 19 innings without a dismissal (data complete).
I have a posted a graph of the crowd trends in Australia over the last 50-odd years (sorry I can't seem to embed it on this page). The figures are for daily average attendance, and so are not so much affected by fluctuations in the numbers of matches from year to year. The average uses smoothed data for 4-year intervals, to smooth out the bumps caused by Ashes years.
To better reveal underlying trends, World Cups are not included in the graph. Offseason matches were also excluded.
In spite of much doomsaying, Test match attendances have been rising more
or less continuously in Australia for more than a quarter of a century.
Attendances have basically doubled since 1980. Certainly there were times
before 1980 when crowds were bigger, but back then there were fewer Tests,
and fewer of them were played in smaller venues like Hobart and Perth.
Another striking feature is that attendances at Test matches are now exceeding limited overs internationals (ODI + T20i), even on a daily basis. For a full 4-year period, this has occurred the first time since ODIs became fully established in the calendar in 1979. This is partly due to a softening of support for ODIs during this century, but is something that would have been almost unimaginable 30 years ago, before Twenty20, when the doomsayers thought that ODIs would destroy Test cricket.
More than balancing the drop in ODIs has been a surge in interest in the franchise-based game, in the form of Twenty20 (Big Bash and so forth). As hard as I find it to get personally interested in this aspect, its success is always very welcome as long as it is not at the expense of the Test game.
The Big Bash attracted 823,000 people to the game this summer (might I recommend an excellent new website "Australian Sporting Attendances" that make this data easy to access), and it might have been even more if they had not scheduled the Final in Canberra. Once the World Cup is over, cricket will have had its biggest season ever in Australia. This is heartening at a local level, since A-League soccer has been moving in on cricket's turf, so to speak. Good to see both thriving.
And now they are predicting a TV audience of a billion people for the upcoming India/Pakistan game in Adelaide in the World Cup, rivalling the Soccer World Cup final.
And yes, Test cricket is under threat and strain in other places, but that is a story for another day.
For some time I have listed Manchester 1936, the second session if the second day, as the highest-scoring 2-hour session in Test cricket, with 240 runs. This was based on a newspaper report that India was 69/0 at tea, after England (400/6 at lunch) declared at 571/8. Looking at a wider range of newspapers now online, this now seems unlikely. [Side note: the slow but sure extension of old newspapers available online is revolutionising this sort of research. In the past, I have actually made multiple trips to the British Library, 20,000 km round trip, to do such research, but even then I missed some of the reports I can now get online. The British Library was also not an easy place to do research for those with time constraints.]
The reports are not fully
consistent. However, it appears that England declared at 3:50 and the Indian
innings started at 4:04. India batted about 145 minutes before stumps at
6:30, Mushtaq Ali reaching 100 in 139 minutes and
105 out of 190 overnight. There was therefore no time for a tea break in this
innings: it must have been taken between innings; unusually early, but it
seems to be the case. This leaves us with 171 runs before tea and 190 after.
The day remains the most productive in Test history with 588 runs.
Unfortunately, none of the myriad sources gives the number of overs bowled
during that day.
Perhaps the reported 'tea' at 69/0 was a drinks break after an hour, or at 5pm. At that ime, tea breaks were generally taken on the field in England and would have looked a lot like extended drinks breaks.
Mushtaq Ali's innings needs to be added to the list of centuries in a session, even if the session was an extended one.
This re-establishes Australia's 236/2 at Johannesburg in 1921 as the most productive 2-hour session in Tests.
While I have them on hand here are some stats on the decline in caught and bowled dismissals. After reading about how the power in superbats can represent a hazard to infielders and umpires, I took a look at the proportion of catches in ODIs that are taken by the bowler. If balls are getting hit harder, you might expect fewer to be caught by the bowler. Indeed, there is a clear historical trend.
% catches in ODIs taken by the Bowler
1986-1990 7.8%
1991-1995 7.9%
1996-2000 7.9%
2001-2005 6.1%
2006-2010 5.7%
2011-2015 5.1%
C&B figures were very steady up to 2000 and then suddenly dropped (coinciding with the first Superbats) and continued to drop. For 2014-15, the figures have been even lower, at an all-time low of 4.2%. This is evidence that C&Bs in ODIs are getting harder to take.
In Tests there is a somewhat similar pattern, although less pronounced. C&B in Tests is somewhat lower, perhaps because far more catches go to the slips. The figure for 2011-15 of 3.4% is an all-time low. In three Tests so far 2015, there has been only one C&B in 61 catches.
Reaching a century in style: At Harare in 2002, Inzamam went from 68 to 102 in eight strokes, with 44644444 (not in consecutive balls). However, the six included overthrows.
Various players have seven, but most of the strokes came after reaching 100. At Napier in 2009, Laxman went from 77 to 105 with seven 4s. his scoring from 60 to 105 was 444414444444
Shakib al Hasan is the only player in my database to score more than 50 consecutive runs entirely in boundaries (going from 4 to 56 in 12 strokes at Hamilton in 2010).
Since I have been logging dropped catches in
Tests since 2001, the bowler with most catches dropped is Harbhajan
Singh with 99, followed by Danish Kaneria with 93,
up to July 2014. Spin bowlers tend to have a lot of chances go to short leg,
which is the
hardest position for catchers. Spinners also get more caught and bowled
chances, which have a high drop rate.
Jimmy Anderson leads pace bowlers with 70.
While such data by nature is not rock solid (as others will point out at length) I consider the great majority of dropped catches to be clearly defined and the stats useful, if a little imprecise.
Dominating scoring in an ODI: Gordon Greenidge reached his 100 out of 128 at Auckland in 1987
The following captains have taken the last wicket
(for their team, not the last wicket of the match) AND scored the winning run
in the same Test:
R Benaud, Lahore 1959
AR Border, SCG 1989
Shakib al Hasan, Grenada 2009.
Captains who scored the winning run most times: it is a tie between GC Smith, GS Chappell, and RT Ponting, each with four.
41 captains have hit the winning run in a Test match.
For quite a few years now, perhaps a quarter of a century, a quasi-official player ratings system has been in place. It changes name regularly, along with sponsors, and is currently known as the Reliance ICC Player Ranking. If memory serves, its first manifestation, in the late 1980s, was the Deloitte Rankings.
The website with the current rankings embraces a mountain of data, with complete rankings, on a daily basis, available going back to the beginning, for various types of Men's and Women's international cricket. What is lacking there is any sort of deeper analysis. So I did a bit of downloading. Daunted by the volume of daily data, I downloaded month-by-month data for Test batsmen, going back to 1958. I could (and perhaps should) go back further, but I feel that the methodology works less well when matches are more infrequent, and there is a lack of genuinely competitive teams as one goes back further.
I leave it to others to argue the utility of the ratings. I would say, though, that the principle of weighting performances in favour of recent results is consistent with ratings methods in other sports, and does maintain an up-to-date feel.
Anyhow, some stats. Here are the most appearances at #1 by leading players
Most months as #1 batsman, since 1958
G.S. Sobers
I.V.A. Richards
B.C. Lara
S.R. Tendulkar
G.A. Gooch
K.C. Sangakkara
S.R. Waugh
R.T. Ponting
Javed Miandad
P.B.H. May*
S.M. Gavaskar
J.H. Kallis
A.R. Border
K.F. Barrington
G.M. Turner
C.G. Greenidge
S. Chanderpaul
R.B. Richardson
A.B. de Villiers
M.L. Hayden
K.D. Walters
G.R. Viswanath
R.G. Pollock
H.M. Amla
*incomplete career.
(Sobers' stats include appearances before 1958. He did not reach #1 until 1960.)
Sobers' domination reflects the superiority of his performances in a time when scoring was generally not very high, and the great length of his career. Remarkably, his peak rating of 938 in January 1967 came at a time when he was also winning "Bowler of the Match" awards. He last held top ranking in March 1974, exactly 20 years after his debut and 14 years after his first #1 in 1960 (it is interesting that scoring 1115 runs in ten innings at an average near 200 in 1958 did not get him to #1). As for Richards, at his best I remember him as the most dominating batsman of his time, and unmatched since.
Another way of filtering the data, that might allow better comparison, would be to eliminate months where the player was #1 but did not play. This gives us months where a player actively held onto the top ranking.
#1 and played (retain)
GS Sobers
IVA Richards
SR Tendulkar
KC Sangakkara
BC Lara
GA Gooch
SM Gavaskar
SR Waugh
The next table shows players who actively regained #1 position most times.
SR Tendulkar
BC Lara
IVA Richards
KC Sangakkara
AR Border
GS Sobers
JH Kallis
This data reflects battles royal for top position between Tendulkar and Lara, sustained over a number of years, and also between Richards and Border.
More stats:
· The highest rating since 1958 is 942 by Ricky Ponting in 2006.
· The highest rating for a player who was not #1 is also Ponting, 936 for #2 spot in December 2007, behind Sangakkara on 938.
· Most players with simultaneous ratings in the 900s: four in November 2007. Sangakkara ranked #4 with a rating of 900.
· The lowest rating for a #1 player is 736 by Ian Chappell in August 1973. Chappell, who had just one month as #1, reached a rating of 811 two years later, but never regained #1.
· Biggest lead for a #1 player is 140 by Sobers in Dec 1968. The only other players with 100 leads were Richards (peaking at 110), Gooch (100) and Steve Waugh (121 in Jan 1997).
· Most appearances at #2: 49 by Rohan Kanhai. For the reason why, see Sobers (above).
Finally some stats on Top 10 appearances, as a percentage of career. Interesting to see Kanhai besting Sobers on this measure.
Months in Top 10
% career in Top 10
I.V.A. Richards
A.R. Border
Javed Miandad
R.B. Kanhai
G.S. Sobers
R.B. Richardson
B.C. Lara
G.S. Chappell
J.H. Kallis
K.C. Sangakkara
Finally finally, a word on Tendulkar. It is surprising that his rating never reached 900, peaking at 898 in 2002. More than 20 batsmen since the 1950s have reached higher ratings than this. Tendulkar spent a 53-month period outside the Top 10, from 2005 to 2009. Even so, he made 170 appearances in the Top 10. Perhaps his signal achievement was regaining #1, briefly in 2010, and then again in 2011 (tied with Kallis), more than 20 years after his debut. His appearances at # 1 spanned more than 16 years, surpassing even Sobers.
In Tests, the highest 'combined' average of hat-trick victims is 136.2 by IK Pathan in 2005-06 (Salman Butt, Younis Khan, Mohammad Yousuf). Damien Fleming's hat-trick in 1994-95 totalled 129 and was notable in that the third victim, Salim Malik, had scored 237. This is the only case of the third man in a hat-trick having scored more than one run, and Fleming's total of 302 runs scored (by the batsmen) is the highest by a considerable margin.
It wasn't quite hat-trick, but Bill Voce once dismissed O'Brien, Bradman and McCabe in four balls.
There was a 21+ hour spell of continuous Test cricket on 10/11 March 2001. West Indies/South Africa day 2 at Georgetown ran from 14:05-21:15 GMT. NZ/Pak day 3 at Auckland ran from 21:00-05:30 GMT thanks to a long extension to make up time lost on the previous day. India/Aust day 1 at Kolkata ran from 04:00-11:30 GMT.
In the Melbourne Test, India reached a score of 402 before the first extra was recorded. This has no known precedent. In the 4th Test of 1957/58 at Johannesburg, Australia (401) reached 399 before the first and only extra of the innings, a leg bye. In that innings, there had been two no balls, but as they were scored from, they didn't register as extras at the time. Australia (575) reached 371 with no extras (or no balls) in a Melbourne Test in 1947/48.
'Shortest Longest' Innings
Cuan McCarthy, a South African fast bowler, still has claims on being the least effective Test batsman. In 24 innings, he scored 28 runs with a highest of 5. His longest innings (probably) was a 20-ball duck at Old Trafford in 1951. (Data is missing for one of his innings, but it was probably fewer than 20 balls).
Similarly, Bert Ironmonger (21 innings) had a longest known innings of 20 balls. Some data is missing but not likely to change this figure.
Jack Saunders, an Australian bowler from the early 1900s, batted 23 times but almost never for more than 15 minutes. However, there was one innings (2 runs) that may have been longer than that, but data is missing. Balls faced data is very patchy for his career. His only innings in double figures was 11 off 12 balls.
Reid batted 34 times with the longest being 32 balls. For longer careers,
Chris Martin holds sway, with a longest innings of 34 balls.
The Fastest Bowling of 2014
surveyed Cricinfo's texts for 33 Tests in 2014, and
it exemplified the problems in this area. There were about 1500 balls with
reported speeds, only a small percentage of the 78,000 or so bowled. However,
the highest of 157 kph, by Dale Steyn at Galle, was
doubtful. Here is the text
[41.5 Steyn to Thirimanne, no run, teaser outside off to lure the batsman into a drive, Thirimanne doesn't bite and the speed gun says that ball was 157kph! Really did not look that fast]
Otherwise there was nothing above 153 kph (Morne Morkel 152.7 at Port Elizabeth; Mitchell Johnson registered 152 in the same match). The fact that these were in the same match might raise suspicions about calibration.
It would be possible to study the data a lot more deeply, but I am not sure it is reliable enough, or complete enough, to be worth it.
I saw Shaun Tait the other day, still going around in the T20 Big Bash. He is still firing them in at above 150 kph.
On reports that Richie Benaud is struggling with skin cancer:
I do recall about 10 years ago going to a function where there were quite a number of old-time Australian Test cricketers from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Seeing them in the flesh, I was struck by the observation that they all had one thing in common: weather-beaten skin. All of them had spent much too much time in the summer sun without the skin protection that is essential for us pale people.
There was an obsession with a 'healthy tan' back then. Australians from those times now have the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.
No bowler has taken wickets with both the first ball and the last ball of a completed Test match, but Imran Khan (the original) came close. At Kandy in 1986, Imran dismissed Sidath Wettimuny with the second ball of the match, and later finished the match off by dismissing Jayananda Warnaweera, Pakistan winning the match by an innings.
There are 50 cases of a bowler taking both the first and last wickets of a completed Test. Brett Lee, Imran Khan and Waqar Younis all did so three times.
At this point in time, there have now been 115 Test matches (including draws) since a player from a losing side won a Player of the Match (PoM) award.
There have been seven Tests in that time where a player from the losing side either scored more runs than the PoM (if the award went to a batsman), or took more wickets (if the award went to a bowler); awards for all-round performances were excluded from this part of the analysis.
I figure that Wasim Akram bowled 20 hat-trick balls in Tests. 18 of them were unsuccessful. On other occasions Wasim took wickets with consecutive balls, but they were his last balls in the match, so there was no hat-trick ball. It's hard to check everyone, but there are no other contenders apart from Murali with 17 unsuccessful hat-trick balls.
In India, bowlers seem to be in for nothing but toil and trouble in ODIs, especially at the hands of the Indian batsmen. Some stats: since 2011, teams batting first in India average 282, in other Test-playing countries it is 243. India averages 246 away and 299.7 (!) at home. Other teams that have played in India average 270 in India and 241 elsewhere.
(Uninterrupted games)
Hitting the Winning Run in ODIs: since 1999, although data is not quite complete, there is no doubt about the leader. I found 24 cases for MS Dhoni, with no one else more than 12. Does not include matches that ended with extras.
Dhoni has been not out at the end of an ODI 38 times. (Of course, sometimes his batting partner hits the winning runs.) India lost only one of those games; on that occasion, against Pakistan, India was all out, so Dhoni has never been left not out at the end of 50 overs in a losing cause, at least when batting second.
Shortest interval between last international appearance and date of death.
GF Grace
PJ Hughes
BC Hollioake
HB Cameron
WW Whysall
DJ Pringle
OG Smith
KJ Wadsworth
DLS de Silva
Manjural Islam Rana
FW Milligan
NBF Mann
* indicates ODI appearance
I have updated the lists for fastest and slowest scoring Test batsmen. As in past years, these lists change only slowly, but there is one new important entry, with David Warner qualifying for the first time, and making a spectacular entrance at #6 with a rate of 73.4 runs per 100 balls. We now have what appears a final rate for Virender Sehwag, who has held #2 spot just ahead of Adam Gilchrist.
Moving up the charts is Stuart Broad, who has scored at a Jessopian 113 r/100b in 2014, and gains 5 places, after losing some ground in 2013 thanks partly to an innings of 6 off 77 balls in an attempted match-save. Broad, however, has scored only one half-century in his last 48 Test innings. In better form was Brad Haddin, whose high and fast scoring since the last instalment sees him move from #53 to #42.
Lists for slowest scorers and most tenacious batsmen (longest average innings) don't change much, but Faf du Plessis now qualifies for the latter list and is the highest-ranked present-day batsmen, for now at least. The evergreen Chanderpaul has moved up the list, averaging 148 balls per dismissal since the last assessment in 2013 and is now ranked #29.
A regular feature of cricket commentary is the knell of articles proclaiming the decline and end of Test cricket. Maybe one day they will be right, but I am more than old enough to remember how in the 1980s One-Day cricket was swamping and destroying Test cricket in Australia. Some destruction: last December saw the all-time record cricket crowd, at the MCG, and it was in a Test. Earlier than that, Ashes Test in England in the 1970s were often played before half-empty stands.
In any case, the present situation in India, which has a monkey grip on the game's finances, remains troubling. Test crowds there are poor to indifferent. Yet there is other evidence that Test cricket retains its fascination. You would think that Cricinfo, for example, would go wherever the interest goes, but Test cricket is not losing its place at Cricinfo, in my estimation.
Anyway, some stats. On Cricinfo, a recent Test in Dubai, before mostly empty stands, received 30 articles that attracted over 1150 comments from readers. (This is even though it involves Pakistan, a nation with intractable problems that cannot even host international cricket anymore.) I compared that to the final of the Champions League Trophy, a major match in the Indian T20 sledgehammer that is supposedly destroying Test cricket. The match got nine articles in Cricinfo that attracted a total of 179 comments.
There are still a lot of genuine Test cricket fans out there. It would certainly be interesting to see which matches get the most page visits at Cricinfo.
Some more notes on tea intervals in early Tests.
Prior to 1914, 15-20 minute tea breaks in Australia were normal, but very variable in timing. There was usually no formal tea break if a change of innings occurred after lunch, and sessions as a result could last 2.5 hours or more, in a five-hour day. When Victor Trumper scored a 133 in a 'session' after tea in 1910/11, he batted 154 minutes and 47 overs.
Some reports of early Tests in Australia mention tea breaks taken on the field. Tea breaks occurred in Australia from the very early in the piece. I have noted a tea break on the first day of the 1878/79 Test when Australia was 40/3 after England was out for 113. The 1877 Tests prior to that had rather truncated hours and late lunch breaks.
Brodribb and others describe tea breaks being employed in England in the 1890s. However, I have never noted any references to mid-innings tea breaks in Test match reports from England prior to 1902. Tea breaks of a sort seem to have been taken if there was a change of innings during the afternoon. 15-minute tea breaks are evident in the scorebook of the 1905 series and thereafter.
Hours in the 1905 series appear to be : 11:30 (day 1) or 11:00 (other days) to 1:30; 2:15 to 4:30; 4:45 to 6:30.
Between the wars in England, more often than not, morning sessions were 2.5 hours, 45 minutes lunch, then 2 hour sessions with 15 minutes for tea. The first day was half an hour shorter than this. There were variations on this theme.
Fewest runs in an uninterrupted
drawn Test (5 days):
It can be hard to tell whether a Test has had no interruptions at all. The
Karachi Test of 1977/78 (769 runs) was uninterrupted, except for a visit by
President Zia on Day 3. The scheduled hours were 5.5 per day, and the 5th day
was called off an hour early (for 'lack of interest') .
For a Test with 6-hour days, there was Cape Town 1992/93, 795 runs, which appears to be uninterrupted…
Lowest total at which a #4 batsmen reached 100
(remarkable): last year Mominul Haque
reached 100 when his team was 128 at Chittagong against New Zealand.
This is quite close to the record for opening batsmen, by Chris Gayle
(125, see 30 October 2013)). In 1967, Asif Iqbal once reached 100 when
Pakistan was 194 for 8, and he batted at number 9!
An curious event towards the end of the Pakistan innings in the Test vs Australia in Dubai (1st Test). Sarfraz Ahmed was out to the last ball before tea and the not out batsman Zulfiqar Babar retired hurt and did not resume after tea. Thus two new batsmen appeared for Pakistan post-tea.
At Hamilton in 1996, GR Loveridge retired
hurt on the same ball that DN Patel was out (over 78 ball 3). Until Dubai,
this was unique.
There was a case where Rahul Dravid retired hurt on the same ball as the bowler (Dillon).
There are two players who have
scored four centuries in a row against one opponent, while playing innings
against other countries during the sequence.
HM Amla v India 2010 (253*, 114, 123*, 140)
Shoaib Mohammad v New Zealand 1989/90 (163, 112, 203*,105)
There are record lists for the fewest runs in a "full" day's play: Cricinfo has one here. It is distorted by the changing norms for over rates and length of daily play, varying over history and between countries. I was surprised to find that the record-holder, 95 runs in about 290 minutes play at Karachi in 1956, was a day with only 67.5 overs, vastly atypical for its time, and way below the standards for a 'complete' day even now. The next on the list, 104 runs in the equivalent Test in 1959/60, contained a mere 65 overs (that one was not strictly a complete day, as proceedings were interrupted by a visit and presentation to US President Eisenhower).
[The over counts are from my database: they are not available anywhere else.]
I thought it might be more useful to present the slowest days in term of runs per 100 balls. I simply set the bar at 67 overs or more, and didn't worry too much about whether the days were absolutely complete or interrupted. Remarkably, the record-setting day in 1956 only scrapes into the list at about number 40, and the 1959 Test, even if it had qualified (too few overs), would not be in the top 100. Anyway, here is list of slowest day's play. Some days were decidedly incomplete, but all had more than 67 overs. I have appended notes that help show whether a day was 'complete' or not.
Slowest Test Days, Minimum 67 Overs
Day Runs
Day Wkts
Day Overs
WI v Ind, Bridgetown, Barbados 1962
match ended before stumps
WI v Eng, Bridgetown, Barbados 1954
5-hour day
Aus v Eng, Brisbane ('Gabba') 1958/59 (8-ball ov.)
5-hour day
Eng v NZ, Leeds (Headingley) 1958
rain interruptions
Aus v Eng, Sydney (SCG) 1881/82 (4-ball ov.)
5-hour day
Saf v Aus, Johannesburg (Wanderers) 1957/58 (8-ball ov.)
5.5 hour day
WI v Ind, Bridgetown, Barbados 1962
5-hour day
Pak v Ind, Peshawar (Club) 1954/55
5.5-hour day?
NZ v Pak, Auckland 1964/65
6-hour day
Ind v Eng, Kanpur 1963/64
5.5 hour day
Aus v Eng, Melbourne (MCG) 1891/92
4.5 hour day
Eng v Aus, Manchester (Old Trafford) 1956
match ended before stumps
Aus v Eng, Brisbane ('Gabba') 1958/59 (8-ball ov.)
5-hour day
Saf v Eng, Port Elizabeth 1956/57 (8-ball ov.)
5.5 hour day
NZ v WI, Auckland 1951/52
5.5 hour day
Saf v NZ, Durban (Kingsmead) 1953/54 (8-ball ov.)