And was Bangladesh’s 159 in Chattogram the lowest innings total to include a century partnership?

Steven Lynch12-Nov-2024Ajaz Patel has played two Tests at the Wankhede Stadium, and taken at least ten wickets in both. How many other bowlers have multiple ten-fors on a single ground away from home? asked Ahmedul Kabir from Bangladesh

The New Zealand slow left-armer Ajaz Patel has played two Tests against India in Mumbai – the city of his birth – and taken 25 wickets there: 14 for 225 (including all ten in the first innings) in a defeat in December 2021, and 11 for 160 as New Zealand completed their unprecedented 3-0 whitewash at the Wankhede Stadium last week.Only seven other bowlers have taken two ten-fors in Tests on the same ground away from home. The first was England’s George Lohmann in Sydney, and he was followed by the Australian Hugh Trumble at The Oval, a pair of Englishmen in Colin Blythe (Cape Town) and Sydney Barnes (Durban), Lance Gibbs of West Indies (Old Trafford), and the Australians Dennis Lillee and Shane Warne at The Oval. Barnes did it twice in the same 1913-14 series, with 10 for 105 in the first Test and 14 for 144 in the fourth at the old Lord’s ground in Durban.Was Bangladesh’s 159 at Chattogram the lowest Test total for an innings that included a century partnership? asked Tarif Sherhan Shuvo from Bangladesh via Facebook

Bangladesh were bowled out for 159 in the first innings of their second Test against South Africa in Chattogram last week despite a ninth-wicket stand of 103 between Mominul Haque and Taijul Islam, which rescued them somewhat from 48 for 8.It’s not quite the lowest all-out Test total to include a hundred partnership: New Zealand’s 158 against Australia in Auckland in March 1974 began with an opening stand of 107 between Glenn Turner and John Parker. West Indies were all out for 160 against Sri Lanka in Galle in November 2021 despite an seventh-wicket stand of exactly 100 between Nkrumah Bonner and Joshua Da Silva.When South Africa were all out for 140 at Lord’s in July 1907, Dave Nourse and Aubrey Faulkner put on 98 for the fourth wicket (no one else scored more than six).The lowest completed innings in a one-day international to include a century stand is Pakistan’s 161 against Sri Lanka in Karachi in January 2009, when Salman Butt and Shoaib Malik put on 108 for the fourth wicket.Mominul Haque was out twice in a session during the Chattogram Test. Was this unique? asked Neville Flood via Facebook

After top-scoring with 82 in Bangladesh’s first innings in the second Test against South Africa in Chattogram last week, Mominul Haque was out for a two-ball duck in the follow-on. There were only 14.3 overs between the two dismissals, which both came in the middle session of the third day.The Australian statistician Charles Davis, the king of the ball-by-ball scorecards, says of being out twice in a session: “It happens occasionally in Tests, but is not common. The previous one was Lorcan Tucker of Ireland, against Sri Lanka in Galle in April 2023 – he was out twice in the first session of the third day.”A related statistic is the fastest pair bagged in a Test. For years I thought this was by Pakistan’s MEZ “Ebbu” Ghazali, against England at Old Trafford in July 1954 – he was out twice in the space of about two hours – but actually it seems the record is held by the South African wicketkeeper Tommy Ward, who marked his Test debut in May 1912 by becoming the final victim in both Jimmy Matthews’ hat-tricks for Australia at Old Trafford. Ward collected a king pair within the space of 110 minutes’ playing time.Clem Hill got within touching distance of a hundred in three successive Tests, only to fall for 99, 98 and 97•Getty ImagesApparently someone once had successive Test scores of 99, 98 and 97. Who was this? asked Pete Spencer from England

This unlucky batter was the Australian left-hander Clem Hill, who would have improved on his career total of seven centuries in 49 Tests with a little more luck. In the second Test of the 1901-02 Ashes series, in Melbourne, he was caught by Arthur Jones off the bowling of Sydney Barnes for 99. Then in the next Test, on his home ground in Adelaide, Hill was caught by JohnnyTyldesley off Len Braund for 98, and bowled by Gilbert Jessop for 97.In Hill’s reminiscences, which appeared in an Adelaide newspaper in the 1930s and were later published in book form, he claimed it wasn’t really a case of the nervous nineties. “In the first of them I was in with [Reggie] Duff. He and I had not been partners before, and did not know each other’s ways in running between the wickets. When I was 99, I asked him to be on the move to run a short one. Barnes sent up a short-pitched ball, which I could have square-cut to the boundary – but uppermost in my mind was the thought that I had told Duff to be ready for a single. I attempted to pat it down to third man, but instead touched it into the slips.”The second dismissal was on the Adelaide Oval. I hit a ball from Braund to the north-eastern boundary, where Tyldesley stepped on to the asphalt cycling track, threw out his left hand, and caught the ball. He did not know that he had brought about my dismissal. The arrangement used to be that if a fieldsman took a catch with his foot on the asphalt the batsman was not out. As, however, the umpire could not always tell if a fieldsman’s foot was on the paved track, it was decided by the captains that a catch anywhere on it was out. I knew this, but nobody had told Tyldesley about it.”I was dismissed the third time when facing Jessop, a fairly fast bowler. He bowled one just outside my leg stump. I went to glance it fine but played it onto my pads. The ball rolled between my legs and I watched it go slowly towards my wicket. It was some seconds before the bails fell off.”During New Zealand’s recent historic 3-0 win in India, there were only two centuries scored. Is this a record low for a Test series of three or more matches? asked Matthew Walsham from New Zealand

The only three-figure scores in the recent series in India both came in the first Test in Bengaluru – Rachin Ravindra’s 134 for New Zealand, and Sarfaraz Khan’s 150 for India.But this isn’t very close to the record: there were no individual centuries at all in the three-Test series between Australia and England in 1882-83 and 1888, India vs New Zealand in 1969-70 and 1995-96, Pakistan vs West Indies in 1986-87, and Pakistan vs Zimbabwe in 1993-94. There are 13 series that featured only one century, and 27 others with two (that includes four series of four matches: West Indies vs England in 1934-35, England v Pakistan in 1954, Pakistan vs West Indies in 1980-81, and India vs South Africa in 2015-16).Shiva Jayaraman of ESPNcricinfo’s stats team helped with some of the above answers.Use our feedback form, or the Ask Steven Facebook page to ask your stats and trivia questions

Saved for the Lord’s Test with a long break on this tour, Bumrah took his 15th five-wicket haul on the second day to make his place on the honour’s board

Sidharth Monga11-Jul-2025

Jasprit Bumrah picked up his first five-for at Lord’s•Getty Images

Jasprit Bumrah’s favourite phrase is “money in the bank”. Not sure he follows professional wrestling, but in WWE, “Money In The Bank” is a briefcase that contains a contract entitling the holder to a title shot anytime, anywhere. So the champion could have just survived an hour-long Iron Man and you could cash in at that moment and beat him.Bumrah walks around with the air of a man carrying an invisible briefcase that guarantees wickets anytime, anywhere. Or he has the air of a man who knows he is a genius fast bowler.In Bumrah’s world, money in the bank is days when he bowls well without results. He believes the results will show up sooner or later. Unlike Money In The Bank in WWE, which can be cashed in anytime, money in the bank in cricket depends on various elements not in a bowler’s control: luck, batter’s intent and conditions, to name a few.Related

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Bumrah respects the occasional disconnect between effort and outcome in cricket and bides his time. He hardly goes searching because he believes he deserves more wickets in a certain spell or on a certain day. He doesn’t risk releasing pressure and ruining it for the bowlers who follow.His body, though, is beginning to test his patience. There is this whole unfortunate scenario in the aftermath of his back stress reaction at the start of the year. He is playing only three of the five Tests in this series. There has been too much focus on “will he, won’t he”. It is not the kind of attention he wants.Bumrah has not been pleased with all of it. His demeanour has been a little testy, only a little. There have been suggestions he wanted to play at Lord’s, and so did not play at Edgbaston despite India trailing 1-0 in the series and having more than a week off before that Test. The matches he plays and misses is not his call alone but that of the team in discussion with him.Jasprit Bumrah picked up his first five-for at Lord’s•Getty ImagesAs India won without Bumrah at Edgbaston, two curious but eventually shallow bits of stats did the rounds: Mohammed Siraj’s bowling average improves from 33 to 26 in his absence, India’s win percentage goes up from 40 to 70.It is in this context that the first day of money in the bank at Lord’s becomes a little curious. Bumrah started it by drawing an edge with the first ball he bowled to Ben Duckett only to see it not carry. He swung the ball bewitchingly late, paired it with nip off the pitch, and made a few batters look incredibly silly. He induced a false shot once every three deliveries, sprayed the ball a little on a few occasions, and ended with just one wicket in 18 overs. You wondered if he took this day with the same equanimity and considered it more money in the bank.A teaser of what was to follow was seen late on day one when Bumrah went for the mightiest of tricks in fast bowling: swing one way, seam the other way, and hit the top of off. It is arguable whether it is physically possible for batters to react to this kind of movement. Mostly they hope the ball misses the stumps. The beauty of that Harry Brook dismissal was that Bumrah had tried each end without luck. He then went back to the end with lower bounce, and bowled the exact length needed to hit top of off, which had shortened by a metre since the first session. That is the extent of how soft the balls are going.2:43

‘Don’t want to be fined for making statements about ball change’

On the second morning, Bumrah repeated the trick twice from the bouncier Nursery End with the second new ball. He made the length adjustment again. To Ben Stokes, he went slightly closer on the release from around the wicket. To Joe Root, he swung the ball away a lot, pitched it up, then found seam movement against that angle; it would have just missed off but the inside edge took it on to uproot middle stump.With three swipes of genius, he ripped out the heart of England’s batting. Then came the ball change, which resulted in a quiet period with the replacement ball. He came back after lunch, went closer on the release to Jofra Archer, got awayswing and then seam back in, and hit the stumps three-fourths of the way up.Patient as Bumrah is, this five-for – his 15th in 47 Tests – had a bit of “I’m cashing in” than relying on circumstances to change while he keeps bowling good length and line. He still hit the good length with 54% of his deliveries but went into the 6-7metre band 30% of the time, which is slightly high for him. Perhaps he was just a little impatient. Perhaps he wanted to hit the stumps more often: eight times in 18 overs on day one to seven times in nine overs on day two.The attention will remain on Bumrah. Whatever the result at Lord’s, as the fourth Test in Manchester approaches, people will start asking which of the remaining matches he will play. And if it is 2-2 after Old Trafford, and he’s already played three Tests, there will be questions about whether he should push himself and play the finale. There is no way around it. The good thing is, Bumrah still has plenty of money in the bank, and not the WWE version, which you lose when you cash it in for a title shot.

Bowlers like Tharindu could redefine their craft, while batters like Shanto could carve new Test legacies. But how many opportunities will they get?

Andrew Fidel Fernando17-Jun-2025It was just as the freshest cycle of the World Test Championship (WTC) 2025-27 was approaching its fourth hour that the freshest Test cricketer on the planet pivoted at the top of his mark, and did something a little bit special.In his first 95 deliveries in Test cricket, Tharindu Rathnayake had been a right-arm offspinner. But like a magician who plunges himself into the hat and pulls out a different version of his own self, Tharindu chose this moment to pretty much instantaneously yank out his slow left-arm avatar. The field barely had to move. Tharindu bowled a tidy enough first ball of left-arm spin. It got cut away behind square for a single.In that first fascinating moment of Tharindu’s ambidexterity, this team felt emphatically and inescapably Sri Lankan. It felt like Tharindu was the latest entry into a proud tradition of bowling rebellion. This is a tradition that brought cricket delights such as wrist-spin offbreaks (Muthiah Muralidaran), down-swinging round-arm yorkers (Lasith Malinga), and the carrom ball (Ajantha Mendis and Rangana Herath).Related

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In fact, so steeped is Sri Lanka in bowling weirdness that Tharindu is only the second ambidextrous spinner in this team, Kamindu Mendis also having bowled in Test cricket with both arms. Which means that the XI has as many dual-arm spinners as it does spinners that bowl with only the boring single arm.If Tharindu – for whom bowling is the primary suit – and Kamindu have long careers together, there is the chance that between them, they can open up entirely new sections of bowling analysis. We may suddenly find ourselves asking questions never seriously asked in cricket.Which arm does he get more wickets with? Which arm does he bowl quicker with, and does this correlate to him being more economical? If it’s established that he is a better offspinner, does he get more right-hander wickets with that style, or is the ball turning away always going to be more threatening to right-handers? If he bowls nine offbreak overs consecutively, does he tend to gain a competitive advantage in switching to his less-tired left arm? And on pitches that have footmarks to work with, this guy will probably be unstoppable, right? The lines of attack available… wow!Test cricket’s great strength is that it offers the broadest canvas of maybe any sport in existence. What shapes will come out of Tharindu’s unusually broad brush?And while Sri Lanka are still attempting to regenerate their spin-bowling, Bangladesh were attempting something similar, but on the batting front. There is an ongoing exodus. Tamim Iqbal, Shakib Al Hasan, and Mahmudullah are out already. Only Mushfiqur Rahim remains of the first generation of Bangladesh greats. Where are the consistent big runs going to come from?Mushfiqur Rahim and Najmul Hossain Shanto carved a stand to remember•Getty ImagesOn day one of the first Test in Galle, Bangladesh seemed to have done the better job of replacing their greats, with Najmul Hossain Shanto joining Mushfiqur on a trip to triple-figures, at the same venue Mushfiqur hit Bangladesh’s first ever double-hundred in 2013.But while Sri Lanka and Bangladesh’s Test cricketers are trying to expand the game in their little ways, the environment in which they operate is rapidly shrinking. After this series ends, Sri Lanka have no Test scheduled until May 2026, which is partly why both Angelo Mathews and Dimuth Karunaratne quit this year.Bangladesh also have only 12 Tests (the minimum amount) in their two-year WTC cycle, though they also have non-WTC Tests scheduled against Ireland and Zimbabwe. South Africa, the champion Test side as of Saturday,have only 14 Tests on the ledger, while West Indies have 14 too. It increasingly feels like a coup for these teams to average merely seven Tests per year.The argument is not that Test cricket is dying. In some places, it is in more spectacular health than it has ever been. In both Australia and England in this decade, the Ashes series have smashed viewership records. Just in the last week, the ECB CEO said that ” in terms of commercial importance”, Test series against India were worth as much as The Ashes.After winning the IPL with his beloved Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), Virat Kohli insisted that although that victory was sweet, it ranked “five levels below Test cricket”. But then what qualifies as real Test cricket is also in contention. Kohli, for example, played 47% of his Tests against either Australia or England, but never faced Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or Ireland.Sri Lanka have no Test scheduled until May 2026, which is partly why Angelo Mathews chose to retire•AFP/Getty ImagesEssentially, Test cricket has chosen to build high, rather than wide. There is sufficient money in cricket that it could choose to divert to Tests in nations outside the Big Three, but there is less will. The WTC could require every team to play 16 Tests in the cycle to qualify. The ICC could finally put that ‘Test cricket fund’ into place, whereby the Big Three pay to support Tests elsewhere in the Full Member world. Instead, cricket has arrived at a situation in which England play 60% more Tests than most other nations.While some suggest that playing more Tests is a WTC disadvantage, players from teams who play fewer Tests point out that their opportunities to develop Test skills are scarcer. Even if teams that played fewer Tests had an advantage – and there is no serious evidence they do – they gain so little from winning. South Africa’s men do not have a home Test scheduled for the next 15 months.Increasingly, it has begun to feel as if places such as Galle are Test cricket’s hinterlands. Does what happens here matter, especially when no Big Three team is on the field? If commercial value is to increasingly become cricket’s supreme good, where does that leave Tests like this one? And is the size of your home cricketing economy the greatest predictor of opportunities available to you?Bowlers such as Tharindu could potentially redefine their craft, while batters such as Shanto could carve new Bangladesh Test legacies. But they may never get the chance to. To what extent does cricket really care? As the sport continues to centralise power, these are the margins at risk of being trimmed.

A treacherous pitch made runs scarce, but Washington’s serene control at No.3 quietly outshone the chaos around him

Karthik Krishnaswamy17-Nov-20251:07

What’s the verdict on Washington Sundar at No. 3?

Temba Bavuma played the pivotal innings of the Kolkata Test between India and South Africa, but was he the best batter across the two teams?It sounds like an absurd question when Bavuma scored the only half-century of a low-scoring dogfight, but we like throwing philosophical debates at our readers, angering some of them in the process.The answer is, maybe, he quite possibly was, but he quite possibly wasn’t, judging by two measures.Related

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On a pitch as treacherous as this one at Eden Gardens, control percentage, with a few caveats, is a good way to separate batters who happened to spend good amounts of time at the crease from batters who demonstrated a method of staying in over a good amount of time.And on a pitch as treacherous as this one, batters had a trade-off to make between control and run-scoring, and take on certain risks to keep the scoreboard moving, so they weren’t just hanging in before the inevitable wicket ball arrived. In-control strike rate, then, gives us an idea of how efficiently these batters created run-scoring opportunities.By both these measures, Bavuma ranks fairly low among the 11 batters who faced at least 50 balls across both innings – the second-lowest control percentage (76.19), and the fifth-lowest in-control strike rate (37.50).