News
22 Jul 2011, 05:52 pm
Summary
2000th Test coincides with India’s 100th v England
London, July 21: The much awaited Lord’s Test can aptly be described as a statistician’s dream. Coming after 1999 Tests in the history of the game and 99 Tests between England and India, there were other landmarks reached on Day 1 that deserve a mention. Read on to find out which batsman completed a 1000 runs at the ground and who completed a staggering century of Tests overall.
This is the 2000th Test match in cricket history. The first 1000 Tests took 107 years to be played while the next 1000 came in just 27 years.
Chronological milestones in Test history
Test No. 1 | Australiav England at Melbourne in 1877 |
Test No. 100 | Australiav England at Sydney in 1908 |
Test No. 500 | Australiav West Indies at Melbourne in 1960-61 |
Test No. 1000 | Pakistanv New Zealand at Hyderabad in 1984 |
Test No. 1500 | Englandv West Indies at Birmingham in 2000 |
Test No. 2000 | England v India at Lord’s in 2011 |
This match is also the 100th Test between India and England. This provided the fifth instance in Test cricket of two teams completing a century of Tests against each other. The other four are: Australia v England – 326, England v West Indies – 145, England v South Africa – 138 and Australia v West Indies – 108.
India’s landmark Tests against England
Test No. 1 | at Lord’s in 1932 (lost by 158 runs) |
Test No. 25 | at Bombay BS in 1961 (drawn) |
Test No. 50 | at Calcutta in 1977 (lost by 10 wickets) |
Test No. 75 | at Birmingham in 1986 (drawn) |
Test No. 100 | at Lord’s in 2011 (game in progress) |
MS Dhoni, leading India for the first time in England, put the hosts in to bat after winning the toss. He thus became only the third Indian captain to elect to field in his first Test in England. Kapil Dev (1986 at Lord’s) and Mohammad Azharuddin (1990 at Lord’s) are the others to have done the same. While Kapil’s move clicked and India won the match by five wickets, Azharuddin’s decision backfired as England piled on 653 for four and eventually won the match by 247 runs.
The match is Duncan Fletcher’s 100th as coach. His tally includes 96 Tests for England and four for India. Fletcher thus became the first player to coach in 100 Tests. The following table gives the details of leading coaches in Test cricket:
Mts | Won | Lost | Drawn/Tied | Remark | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Duncan Fletcher | 100* | 43 | 30 | 26 | Eng (96) / Ind (4) |
Bob Simpson | 93 | 39 | 19 | 34/1 | Aus |
John Buchanan | 90 | 69 | 10 | 11 | Aus |
Dav Whatmore | 74 | 23 | 39 | 12 | SL (49) / Ban (25) |
Bob Woolmer | 72 | 31 | 20 | 21 | SA (44) / Pak (28) |
Alistair Cook (12) suffered a rare failure. He had scored at least a fifty in all the five previous innings he batted in the year 2011. In fact, he had crossed fifty in his last six consecutive innings. The sequence: 82 (v Aus at Melbourne), 189 (v Aus at Sydney), 133 (v SL at Cardiff), 96 and 106 (v SL at Lord’s) and 55 (v SL at Southampton).
Andrew Strauss fell to Zaheer’s bowling once again. He has now faced 324 balls from Zaheer in Tests, scoring 106 runs and being dismissed six times – an average of 17.66 and run-rate of 1.96 runs per over.
The following table lists Zaheer’s bunnies in Test cricket. Strauss may soon displace Matthew Hayden from the top spot.
Zaheer’s bunnies in Test cricket
Matthew Hayden (Aus) | 7 |
Andrew Strauss (Eng) | 6 |
Tim McIntosh (NZ) | 6 |
Kumar Sangakkara (SL) | 6 |
Graeme Smith (SA) | 6 |
Jonathan Trott (58*) scored a fifty on his first appearance against India. He now averages a whopping 141.00 in Lord’s Tests – 564 runs in six innings with two hundreds and two fifties.
Kevin Pietersen, batting on 20, completed 1,000 runs in Test matches at Lord’s. He joined five others - Graham Gooch (2015), Alec Stewart (1476), Andrew Strauss (1386), David Gower (1241) and Geoff Boycott (1189) - who have also achieved the distinction. Incidentally, Pietersen has the best average (58.94) among the six.
