I posed a cricket trivia question at the end of a recent post. My multitasking skills weren’t up to it.
The question should have read:
Which five cricketers have done the treble of 3000 runs, 100 wickets and 100 catches at Test level?
Apologies to those of you who’ve been trying to come up with impossible answers.
Incidentally, the one part of the question I remembered easily was the answer, which I had memorised… and then I had to reconstruct the question from that answer.
Talking about reconstructing questions from answers, there used to be a competition in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I think it was on the radio. I was still in Calcutta, so all this came to me secondhand or even further removed.
This is all I can remember. They gave you a list of everyday answers to trivia questions. You had to come up with the most original question befitting any one such answer.
The runner up was:
The answer was Dr Livingstone I Presume. The question was “What is your full name, Dr Presume?”
The winner:
The answer was Crick. The question was “What is the sound made by a Japanese camera?”
Does anyone know where I can find out more about this competition?
Carl Hooper (5762 runs, 114 wickets, 115 catches)
Garry Sobers (8032, 235, 109)
Ian Botham (5200, 383, 120)
Jacques Kallis (8158, 203, 102)
Shane Warne (3154, 708, 125)
Sanath Jayasuriya has plenty of runs but only 96 wickets and 76 catches. He might make the list at a pinch but only if he can decide whether he has retired or not.
Nobody else is close. Great list, and proves what an under-rated cricketer Carl Hooper was.
:-) As you can imagine I was watching at the time Kallis moved past 200 wickets as well as 100 catches. And, as you observe, I came out of my multitasking slumber when I heard Hooper’s name, which is why I remembered the answers better than the question.
No Waughs. No Kapil Dev or Richard Hadlee or Imran Khan. I must confess I haven’t checked though.
Well done…..I was looking at ODI for Jayasuriya
Steve
You are right, no Kapil Dev, which was my first starting point.
Steve, you are right about Sir Garry Sobers’s record being remarkable in context. He played the fewest matches of the five to achieve these landmarks. Maybe Shane Warne will be knighted one day too, but aggregate records are going to get broken more often as players get fitter and Test Matches get more frequent.
Maybe he would have the good grace to refuse a knighthood after what he said about Paul Collingwood’s MBE :-)
What is Cricket??
Cricket is something played by people who also play football and hockey, all without the help of humongous body armour or advertisements.
The Waugh record: 18956 runs, 162 wickets and 293 catches.
The Steve half was 8 wickets short of qualifying on his own.
And I’m not sure about the body armour or advertisements these days. Sachin Tendulkar’s bat appears to be made by a tyre manufacturer these days.
At least it’s legal. Not sure I can say that about a few of the more prolific centurions of today.
But is it cross-ply or radial?
Can you name the batsman who played only one first class innings, scored a double century and never batted in a first class match again?