What can we glean from the schoolboy record of 1009 not out, which no one had considered possible or necessary so far?
Andy Zaltzman07-Jan-2016The Cape Town Test will be remembered for different things by different people. Many will treasure the trail of devastation concocted by Ben Stokes. Others will focus on Hashim Amla’s serene resistance, Temba Bavuma’s historic hundred, England’s final-day microwobble, and a general sense that this Test was simultaneously a bit of a disappointment and far better than it might have been. For me, however, it will always go down as the first Test innings in which a team’s Nos. 4, 5 and 6 have all been out between 25 and 30. Root 29; Taylor 27; Stokes 26. Names and numbers that will live in eternity.The main reason for my focus on this particular stat, flumped out unnoticed on the final day, was that an extremely poorly timed post-Christmas holiday caused me to miss not only the decisive majority of the first Test, one of England’s finest victories of recent years, but also the first half of the Newlands match, including the greatest display of sustained leather-bludgeoning in my country’s cricketing history. On the plus side, I did eat more outstanding Italian ice cream than is medically advisable, and a mozzarella that could bring the dead back to life. Swings and roundabouts.England’s first innings had also provided the first instance of Nos. 6 and 7 both reaching 150, and the 571 scored by Stokes, Bairstow, Bavuma and de Kock was the highest match aggregate by sixes and sevens – de Kock’s priceless 5 proving decisive in nudging the Cape Town Test ahead of the Bangladesh-Sri Lanka match in Chittagong from January 2009, when 567 were scored by the middle two positions. So many pointless numbers to enjoy amidst the brutal majesty, the ethereal elegance and the twinkle-footed history.As 600-plays-600 run-gluts go, this was without doubt the most compelling in Test history, aided by the subplot of a possible momentum shift in the series, and adorned with a motley collection of what-if turning points that favoured the batting sides, from England’s impressively varied catalogue of dropped chances to the Morkel no-ball that cost a few crucial overs of Rootedness, to the millimetre of Bairstow’s boot that saved him from being stumped.Nevertheless, the two sets of bowlers between them posted the third worst combined first innings in Test history, taking 11 wickets at 111 apiece. Only in the Lahore Test between Pakistan and India in January 2006, when both sides’ batsmen obliterated the opposing bowlers in a rain-affected slugfest (679 for 7, including two run-outs, versus 410 for 1, including Sehwag spanking 254 off 247), and the more sedately paced but also 1000% drawn Karachi Test of February 2009, when Pakistan topped Sri Lanka’s 644 for 7 with their own 765 for 6. In those games, the bowlers’ first-innings averages were 177 and 115 respectively. A tip of the statistical hat also to the India v New Zealand Test in Delhi in December 1955, when the batsmen of New Zealand (450 for 2 in 176 overs) and India (531 for 7 off 241.5) consorted to give each other’s bowlers the highest collective first-innings strike rate of all time – 278, or a wicket every 46.2 overs.I am now back in my rightful cricket-watching shed for the final two matches of England’s 17-Test marathon that began in the aftermath of a harrowingly awful World Cup, has encompassed an almost heroic level of inconsistency, and is ending with a team that looks like it could become very good indeed. Or continue being entertainingly inconsistent.
Opening bowler Aayush Kamath’s match-clinching 8 for 16, including a hat-trick that demolished Arya Gurukul’s fragile middle order, was sadly overlooked by the world’s media. Cricket is a team game. Let us never forget that
● Cricket loves statistical milestones, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. A player who has clonked a stress-free hundred on a flat pudding is often considered more established than one who has chiselled out a match-turning 70 on a spicy surface with the game in the balance, simply because of that mystically powered “1” in his personal hundreds column. A haul of 5 for 342 outdoes 4 for 0 as a bowler’s “best”.What, then, to make of the first 1000-run innings, planked in stupidly quick time by Pranav Dhanawade for the KC Gandhi English School against Aryu Gurukul?The 1000-run threshold was not, it is fair to say, a landmark that had preoccupied cricket in the way that, say, the four-minute mile entranced the athletics world in the 1950s, given that no one had come within 350 runs of the four-figure barrier at any point in at least the last 100,000 years, if not longer. There had been no near-miss, like Hanif Mohammad’s 499, where he was run out in pursuit of first-class cricket’s first quintuple century. Dhanawade unleashed a bolt from the statistical blue that no one had considered either possible or necessary. We now know it is at least one of those two.One of the most impressive aspects of Dhanawade’s innings, in which 57% of the balls he faced were dispatched to or over the boundary, was that he had the psychological fortitude to be bothered to keep smacking fours and sixes when any sense of a bat-versus-ball challenge must have long since evaporated, and all that was left was boy versus maths.All cricketing achievements must be seen in the context of the opposition, and it is fair to say that the Arya Gurukul team have “room for improvement”. Bowled out for 31, they then conceded a disappointing 1465 for 3 declared, scored at 15.6 per over, before – as so often happens to teams who have shipped 1400-odd in the field – collapsing with the bat again. The declaration proved perfectly timed, with a lead of 1434 just tempting enough to make Arya Gurukul think they could launch a Kolkata-2001-style counterattack.Sadly for them, there was neither a junior Laxman, nor a proto-Dravid in their ranks. They were reduced to 10 for 7 – all seven boys dismissed failing to trouble the scorers – before Sarth Salunke and Tejas Misar frightened the life out of the KC Gandhi XI with a monumental stand of 42, one of the all-time great eight-wicket rearguards, which could have turned the match on its head if only it had lasted 40 or 50 times longer than it did.Opening bowler Aayush Kamath’s match-clinching 8 for 16, including a hat-trick that demolished Arya Gurukul’s fragile middle order (surely the selectors will look to make changes for their next game after five players bagged pairs), was sadly overlooked by the world’s media. Cricket is a team game. Let us never forget that.After the chastening innings-and-1382-run defeat, questions will inevitably be asked about the decision of the Arya Gurukul school governors to appoint Alan Mullally as batting coach and David Gower as bowling coach, rather than the other way round. There were few positives to take away from this mauling, other than opening batsman Salunke’s 13 and 20 not out – Bradmanesque, in the context of his team-mates’ numerically challenged efforts – and two useful contributions by extras (12 and 16).The bowlers, it is fair to say, simply did not give their skipper the control you need in Bhandari Cup school cricket, although the parsimonious young Pratik Bedekar kept an end relatively tight by only being smashed for 13.3 per over. And there will be an understandable clamour in the Arya Gurukul press for wicketkeeper-captain Swaraj Deshmukh to reconsider his position, after he scored a pair, conceded 14 byes, and went for 80 off five overs when he took the pads off. His decision to bat first can now be put alongside Nasser Hussain’s Brisbane 2002 let’s-have-a-bowl howler as one of the great toss-winning bloopers of all time. How differently might the game have gone if it had gone completely differently?Who knows what the future holds for Dhanawade? Even three-figure scores will now have the Twittersphere bleating that he’s over the hill and only in the team on reputation. He has his place in cricketostatistical immortality, the boy who scaled a mountain no one even knew was there.
