Cricket writing, from our own data
Cricket records, rules explained and notes on the daily puzzles. Written from our own dataset, never rewritten from a news site.
Ricky Ponting by the numbers, and the side he captained
13,378 Test runs at 51.85, and a captaincy record of two World Cups and 48 Test wins, in charge of the strongest side the sport has produced.
Rohit Sharma by the numbers, and three one-day double centuries
Nobody else has scored one double century in a one-day international and been able to do it twice. He has three, and a Test career that started properly at 32.
Sachin Tendulkar by the numbers, and what they cannot show
200 Tests, 15,921 runs at 53.78, and a hundred international centuries. The records are the least interesting thing about a career that lasted twenty-four years.
Shane Warne by the numbers, and what he did to leg spin
708 Test wickets from a discipline everybody had written off as too expensive and too unreliable for the modern game. The wickets are only half of what changed.
Shaun Pollock by the numbers, and an economy rate of 2.39
421 Test wickets at 23.11 with an economy rate of 2.39, plus 3,781 runs, from an all-rounder who almost never bowled a bad ball in seventeen years.
Shivnarine Chanderpaul by the numbers, and the stance nobody copied
11,867 Test runs at 51.37, scored from an open, crab-like stance that every coach would have corrected, for a side that lost most of the matches he saved.
Steve Waugh by the numbers, and the sixteen consecutive wins
10,927 Test runs at 51.06, and a captaincy record of forty-one wins from fifty-seven Tests including sixteen in a row, which nobody has approached.
Stuart Broad by the numbers, and the spells that broke matches
604 Test wickets, and a career defined by half a dozen spells in which he took five or six wickets in an hour and turned a losing position into a won one.
Sunil Gavaskar by the numbers, and the first ten thousand
10,122 Test runs and 34 centuries, made against the fastest bowling in history, without a helmet, opening the batting for a side that mostly lost.
What counts as an all-rounder, and the four definitions in use
Four definitions are in circulation and only one of them is testable: does the batting average exceed the bowling average. Very few players in history clear it.
The concussion substitute, and why it is unlike any other rule
It is the only rule in cricket that lets a replacement bat and bowl, and it exists because the alternatives were a concussed player continuing or a side playing with ten.
A tie is not a draw, and the difference is not pedantry
A tie means the scores finished level with the match complete. A draw means time ran out. One has happened twice in Test cricket; the other happens constantly.