Category: Cricket

Thank God for the Web. How else could I have done what I did a few minutes ago?

It all started this morning. I was doing my snooze-awake thing, a critical technique practised and refined over years of really important business meetings. You know the one I mean. When your eyes are open, one ear is cocked attentively and tuned to the right channel, and the rest of you is fast asleep, ready to spring into action as soon as your name is mentioned. That’s what I mean by snooze-awake.

So there I was. Snooze-awake, with the cricket on in the background; India versus Pakistan at Eden Gardens; there was nothing really happening, India had just declared, and Pakistan had yet to come out. The expert commentators were out in their droves. And then someone said something.  He said that it looked like VVS Laxman had scored a century consisting solely of ones and boundaries.

I sprang awake. And a part of me went “wow, could that be true?”. So I resolved to check it out, which, thanks to the web, I can now do. Easily. So I went to Cricinfo, got to this page containing ball-by-ball text commentary for the entire Indian innings, and laboriously went through every ball Laxman faced, all 178 of them. And it was true. VVS Laxman scored his 112 all in ones and fours.

I wonder how often that has happened before. And how I would find the answer to that question. Any budding Bill Frindalls or Wendy Wimbushes out there?

Incidentally, I understand that India managed to achieve an unusual sequence in this innings: 111/1, 222/2, 333/3, 444/4, 555/5.  Again, I wonder just how often that has been done.

For those of you who don’t follow cricket, all I can say is it’s never too late. The sound of willow on leather. The sound of harrumphing moustaches and gentle snores. The sound of the Barmy Army and of calypso cricket. The sound of Eden Gardens in full cry.

Cricket. A game of sounds. And numbers.

As I mentioned in a recent post, India hold the unwanted record of posting the highest innings score without any individual hundreds. Today that record seemed set to be “bettered”, until Kumble came along and scored his maiden Test century. While musing about unwanted records, I commented that Michael Atherton held some record or the other in this respect.

I was right. He holds the record for the highest number of ducks by an England player. Here’s the table, by team:

• West Indies: Courtney Walsh 43
• Australia: Glenn McGrath 35
• Sri Lanka: Muttiah Muralitharan 34
• New Zealand: Danny Morrison 24
• India: Bhagwat Chandrashekhar 23
• Pakistan: Waqar Younis 21
• England: Michael Atherton 20
• South Africa: Makhaya Ntini 18
• Zimbabwe: Grant Flower 16

Not sure who holds the Bangladesh record, need to work on that one.

While constructing the table above, I found something else that might interest cricket fans. I’ve decided to call it the Ponting Number, defined as follows:

A Ponting Number is the result obtained by subtracting the number of zeroes scored by a batsman from the number of centuries scored by that batsman, all in Test cricket. Double-digit positive Ponting numbers are rare, as the table below shows. I’ve tried to include everyone I could think of who could possibly have a Ponting Number 10 or greater.

• Ricky Ponting +24
• Sachin Tendulkar +23
• Don Bradman +22
• Sunil Gavaskar +21
• Rahul Dravid +18
• Brian Lara +17
• Allan Border +17
• Matthew Hayden +15
• Mohammed Yousuf +15
• Gary Sobers +14
• Jacques Kallis +14
• Viv Richards +14
• Greg Chappell +12
• Steve Waugh +10
• Inzamam-ul-Haq +10

This is just an early cut, sometime over the next week or so I will compile a list of ALL players with double-digit Ponting Numbers.

Looks like India will beat its own record for the highest Test innings score without a hundred: they’re currently 513 for 7, four runs behind 2nd spot and 11 runs behind 1st spot; if you interested, I published the top 10 such scores in this post. And it made me think, they didn’t really want that record. For sure Karthik and Tendulkar and Dhoni didn’t want it.

That took me on a tangent. There are many “unwanted” records in Test cricket, like for example the batsman with the highest number of 0s to his name. You may be surprised by the answer. I think it used to be Atherton, but I haven’t been able to check, Statsguru is too slow right now.

Why don’t you write in with your views on what should be the most unwanted Test cricket record? Seems a lazy August thing to do.

As some of you would have gathered by now, I’m a bit of a cricket nut. [If you have no idea what the game is about, take a look at the Wikipedia entry that I’ve linked to, it’s a reasonably good place to start.]

Today was one of those frustrating days when I was sure Tendulkar would get his 38th hundred, but it was not to be. I make no comment whatsoever about at least four of today’s dismissals, other than to say I make no comment.

Moving on. By the time Taufel had upheld appeals for the dismissals of Tendulkar and Ganguly, I began to wonder whether an unusual record was in sight. The highest innings score by a team without any individual hundreds. So I decided to google it, found a route to a story in Cricinfo that listed the following entries:

• India 524/9 declared (1976, Kanpur, v New Zealand, drawn)
• South Africa 517 (1998, Adelaide, v Australia, drawn)
• Pakistan 500/8 declared (1981, v Australia, Melbourne, won)
• Bangladesh 488 (2005, v Zimbabwe, Chittagong, won)
• Australia 485 (1993, v New Zealand, Christchurch, won)
• India 485 (1997, v Sri Lanka, Nagpur, drawn)
• South Africa 479 (2000, v India, Bangalore, won)
• England 477/9 declared (1994, v South Africa, Leeds, drawn)
• Australia 476 (1912, v England, Adelaide, lost)
• West Indies 475 (1962, v India, Bridgetown, won)

Guess it’s time to make a new entry in 7th place. Interestingly, India now have 3 entries in the top 10. And they didn’t win on the other two occasions.

Tim Rice is rumoured to have come up with this in a recent letter to some cricketing journal. A fellow cricket aficionado, Tim has spent hours looking at the npower logo on the cricket ground. Upside down. And, given the font and style used, npower does look a lot like jemodu.

In typical cavalier spirit, he is meant to have written this letter, asking for readers to come up with suggestions as to what this fictional company jemodu should do. It was the sort of madcap thing that appeals to me, so I wanted to blog about it. And the first thing I did was to google “jemodu” in the hope that I would be led to the story, wherever I’d seen it.

No such luck. But.

You could knock me down with a feather. There is a company called jemodu. Appears to have been formed on 26th September 2006. Wonder what they do….. One thing’s for sure, the founder’s a cricket fan.