大象传媒

Note to Bill - the fourth wicket your answer to Tim Gill is out of date, as mentioned on the blog the record is now 878 by Queensland (900/6 dec.) vs Victoria in the 2005-06 Pura Cup final.

Note to 大象传媒 staff - evidently my suggestion last time that only questions which the rest of us had failed to answer be passed on to Bill, in order for him to demonstrate his superiority to us mere mortals in this respect, wasn't taken up - Bill successfully answered the questions regarding man of the match awards and non-participation in the course of a Test "career", but most of the rest had already been answered.

1. Stephen - as Craig mentions, this happened in the 2005 Ashes series; Bill has also, on two occasions, pointed out a no-ball which the official scorers missed. Also, bear in mind that the official records of the match are the two scorebooks and not the scoreboard(s), and it can sometimes be the case that the books are right and the board is wrong - probably the most notable instance of this was the 1958-59 Quaid-e-Azam Trophy semi-final between Karachi and Bahawalpur. The scoreboard showed Hanif Mohammad 496 not out with two balls of the day remaining so, by his own account, he intended to hit each for two to reach 500. He was run out attempting the first of them, and returned to the pavilion believing that he had made 497 - only to be told by the scorers that the board had been wrong and that his score was in fact 499. Apparently he still blames the scoreboard operators, insisting that had he known his actual score he would have adopted different tactics...

2. Dean - I saw this happen in a school match once (lovely people that we were, we all had a good laugh at the victim), I doubt it's happened that often in Tests though.

3. Craig - Wisden ran an article on this sometime in the 1990s, reporting that Graham Gooch had just overtaken Jack Hobbs at the top of the list of combined first-class and List A (ODIs and domestic one day matches); of course Hobbs never played one day matches and neither of them played Twenty20. Gooch finished with 67,057 runs (44,846 first-class, 22,211 one day) to Hobbs's 61,760 (give or take a few, since there's some dispute as to whether certain matches in which he played should counted as first-class). Of current players, Graeme Hick has recently also passed Hobbs and now has 63,233 (40,423 first-class, 21,881 one day, 929 Twenty20). Whether he'll keep playing long enough to overtake Gooch is something only he knows.

5. Tom - the same question occurred to me! So many sets of brothers have played first-class and Test cricket that I'd imagine there must be numerous instances of two of them making a duck in the same innings, but unrelated players with the same surname are rarer. The only recent pair I can think of is Geraint and Simon Jones, and they never did so because Geraint only made two Test ducks, they came in the same match and Simon wasn't playing.

8. Innocent Abroad - "Only one man ever wrote about cricket like that.". I'm not as well versed in cricket writing as you evidently are, but would I be correct in thinking that you're referring to Neville Cardus?

10. Peter - for the record, Graeme Hick has made one FC triple century other than the 405*: 303* for Worcestershire vs Hampshire at Southampton in 1997. I'm not absolutely sure of this but I think the only batsmen with more than two scores of over 300 in their careers are WG Grace, Hammond and Lara (three each), Ponsford (four) and Bradman (six).

11. Pete - I can't name all the others with two successive ten wicket hauls, but I can tell you that's not the record: Muttiah Muralitharan has taken three (another one I'm not sure of - I think it might even have been four).

12. Graham - Australia have never been whitewashed in a home series of three or more matches, and only once in one of two matches: by England in 1886-87.

13. Santonu - yes.

15. Stan - I assume you're referring to the 5th ODI at Lahore, where Ntini took 4/61 and was named MoM ahead of Albie Morkel (4/44). Most probably the reason was that Ntini's victims were all recognised batsmen, whereas three of Morkel's were tailenders.

16. Paul - I'd expect a sextuple hundred would be fairly boring to watch actually, unless it was by Nathan Astle and he tried to get there in 300 balls or something.

19. Dan - I've checked the list of first-class matches in 1842 and there isn't one involving any Rugby side. It might have taken place but not been first-class though, I couldn't say.

22. Bob - no, that referred to a helmet on the ground. The ball becomes dead if it lodges in any part of a fielder's clothing or protective equipment, but not if it just hits the helmet and bounces off.

24. Mick - at a guess, if the ball hits the stumps, the bails fall off and it's not a no ball, then the batsman is out?

29. Peter - one ball being a yard faster than another means that it reaches the batsman a yard in front, i.e. it travels 22 yards in the time it takes the other to travel 21.

31. Lloyd - it's 194, by Saeed Anwar; this is the record for any ODI, since in the days when an innings lasted 60 overs, scoring rates tended to be rather slower than they are nowadays.

32. Shankar - the law which is in place at the moment, and which there are no plans to change, is that the match ends when the winning run(s) is/are scored. So if a team needs 1 to win, the striker hits the ball to the boundary and both batsmen stand still, the winning runs are scored only when the ball reaches the boundary, so all four count (or all six if it clears the boundary). If the striker hits the ball, the batsmen run and complete the first run before the ball reaches the boundary, the game is over immediately so whether or not the ball then crosses the boundary is irrelevant. If the ball is a no ball, then no runs scored off it count, since the game is over as soon as the umpire calls "no ball".

34. Jason - I'm not going to crunch all the run rates, but here are the statistics for draws:

2007 (thus far, not including the one currently in progress): 23 Tests, 5 draws (22%)
1997: 44 Tests, 21 draws (48%)
1987: 25 Tests, 16 draws (64%)
1977: 23 Tests, 7 draws (30%)

So yes, the proportion of draws has decreased.

37. Fawal - D/L stands for Duckworth/Lewis, the two people who devised it. It's a method of calculating a revised target for the team batting second in a one-day match if their innings has been shortened by rain/bad light etc. It's based on the idea that the simple method of just calculating the target based on the run-rate of the team batting first is unfair, because it fails to take into account the number of wickets the team batting second had in hand at the time of the interruption: obviously it is much easier to score 100 off 10 overs with ten wickets in hand than it is to score 500 off 50 overs with ten wickets in hand, for example. They used data from all the ODIs played up to that point to calculate what proportion of a team's total "scoring resources" a particular number of overs remaining and wickets in hand constituted i.e. if a team reached that stage of the innings with that many wickets in hand, what proportion of their innings total they would, on average, score after that point. For instance, a team which has six wickets in hand after 30 overs might expect to score 50% of its total runs after that point (I've no idea if that's accurate). If time is then lost, the same figure is calculated for the point at which the innings now stands (so if ten overs are lost, the team still has six wickets in hand and ten overs remaining, and might be expected to score, say, 35% of its total runs after that point). Subtracting the second figure from the first gives the proportion of the team's "scoring resources" which has been lost (15% in this case), so that's how much the target is reduced by. Obviously if the calculation was based solely on run rate the target would be reduced by 20%, so Duckworth/Lewis gives a different (and, arguably, fairer) target.

And my own question鈥� if a wicket-keeper's average is calculated as the number of byes and leg byes conceded divided by the number of dismissals, which keeper has the best?

Michael (in Strasbourg)

43. Martin - I can give you Les Ames, Godfrey Evans and Allan Knott for starters, probably Bill could add a few more to that list.

46. Mike - Collins's score is generally accepted as the record for a proper match. There have only been five other scores of over 500: 566, CJ Eady, Break o'Day vs Wellington at Hobart, 1902 [under the current laws Eady would have scored 579, since he cleared the boundary 13 times but they only counted for five each at the time]; 515, DR Havewalla, BB&CI Railways vs St Xaviers at Bombay in 1934; 506*, JC Sharp, Melbourne Grammar School vs Geelong College at Melbourne in 1915; 502*, Chaman Lal, Mahendra College vs Government College at Patiala in 1957; and, obviously, Brian Lara in a first-class match.

47. Tim - according to Cricinfo "The Rev. W. Fellows, while at practice on the Christ Church ground at Oxford in 1856, drove a ball bowled by Charles Rogers 175 yards from hit to pitch", so a distance of 140 yards in a match isn't out of the question. A survey of some leading players a few years ago came to the general consensus that the biggest hit seen in recent years came in the second Australia vs New Zealand Test in 1997, when Mark Waugh hit Daniel Vettori out of the WACA. Obviously it's tricky to tell how far a hit might otherwise have carried when a stand gets in the way. For a marketing stunt prior to the 2005 Ashes, Kevin Pietersen attempted to hit a ball over the Thames (148 yards at that point) and fell short by some distance.

48. Jimmy - the relevant Law (24.5) runs thus:

" Fair delivery - the feet
For a delivery to be fair in respect of the feet, in the delivery stride
(i) the bowler's back foot must land within and not touching the return crease.
(ii) the bowler's front foot must land with some part of the foot, whether grounded or raised, behind the popping crease."

49. Harry - I think it's been going at least 13 years (which is as long as I've been following cricket), and yes, it has backfired numerous times - most famously in the 1999 World Cup Super Six match between Australia and South Africa, when Herschelle Gibbs initially held a catch from Steve Waugh then it slipped out of his hand when he attempted to throw it in the air, and Waugh supposedly told him he'd dropped the World Cup (though he denies having said anything of the sort).

56. Innocent - I knew I'd missed some... Paul Downton made his ODI debut while playing for Kent but didn't play a Test until after he'd moved to Middlesex.

57. Gareth - there's only been one instance in a FC match of all ten dismissals in an innings being identical: when John Wisden took all ten for North vs South, and they were all bowled. There have probably been numerous instances of every batsman being bowled (but not all by the same bowler) since in the 19th century being bowled was much more common (and caught much rarer) than nowadays. The record for LBWs in a FC innings is 8, stumpings 6. The most catches in an innings by one player is 8 (two keepers have made 9 dismissals in an innings but each included at least one stumping).

59. Taurun - I'm fairly sure it was Bannerman who scored the first run. I think I recall from somewhere that Test status was only applied to that match retrospectively, when it took place it was billed as "Combined Victoria and New South Wales XI" or something. Not sure when the first Test to be considered such at the time was.

Also meriting a mention is Ian Salisbury - the worst average of anyone with at least 20 wickets (2492 balls, 76.95).

62. Adrian - I don't know of any, but given that there have been 2,509 Test cricketers to date and at a guess probably at least 1,000 or so of them are now dead, I can't say that I know the cause of death in every case...

65. James - there's a slight difference here, in that the status of a match as first-class/list A (or not) is determined by the standard of the two teams (as well, of course, as other criteria such as the number of players, thus ruling out the silly 16-a-side warm-up matches which are arranged these days to give everyone in the squad a chance to get on the field), not by their composition i.e. a first-class team could comprise players from the same county/state/province, but need not necessarily. Some of the first-class matches held in the 19th century (eg Smokers vs Non-Smokers) might seem a bit odd to us, but they featured the best players of the time so they were considered first-class. The status of a match as Test/ODI (or not) is determined by the composition, not the standard (if it were, the Test status of numerous recent matches involving Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, and possibly earlier ones involving other countries in their fledgling days in international cricket, could well be called into doubt). With the curious exceptions of England, which isn't a country but has traditionally played Test cricket under that name despite often including Welsh, and occasionally Scottish or Irish players, and West Indies, which is a group of countries which have traditionally played Tests under the same banner, a Test or ODI team should (unless the ICC decides to conveniently overlook its own rules for the purposes of getting a bit of extra attention for its pathetic idea) represent a country, so what should or shouldn't be considered a Test is generally more clear-cut than what should or shouldn't be considered a first-class match. I also agree with Woodcock that, if a particular match has long been classified as first-class, it should stay that way. Otherwise, is someone just going to go through all the records and cross off any matches in which one or both teams were considered not to be of first-class standard? The Dera Ismail Khan team which lost a match by an innings and 851 clearly can't have been up to very much, but as far as I know no-one has suggested stripping that match of its first-class status solely for that reason.

Thank you Ian, wondered where that had gone. I thought maybe I was going mad...