Saturday, March 29, 2008

it gets tiring being right all the time

Let me give you a couple of examples in a purely cricketing context following my last couple of posts on the subject:

Stephen Fleming's scores during the recent New Zealand v England Test series (won 2-1, not entirely convincingly, by England) were as follows: 41, 66, 34, 31, 59, 66. A microcosm, if you will, of his entire Test career: get in, score between 30 and 70 fairly briskly, look a million dollars, get out, go back to the pavilion, have a nice sit down and a cup of tea. As he himself said, with disarming modesty, after his last innings at Napier: "If I had scored a hundred, it would have been an anomaly".

No sooner do I big up Virender Sehwag on his return to the Indian Test team than he goes completely berserk against a pretty decent South African bowling attack at Chennai yesterday to score the fastest Test triple-hundred ever made. Inevitably there was an element of after the Lord Mayor's show about today, and he only added 10 runs to his overnight 309 before he was out, but he has already rendered some of my carefully-crafted stats out-of-date: his 319 off 304 balls breaks his own record for the highest score made at more than a run a ball, he joins Don Bradman, Javed Miandad and Brian Lara in scoring 250+ more than twice, and Bradman and Lara in scoring 300+ twice, and he extends his consecutive 150+ scores record to ten.. His 257 runs on day 3 is also the most runs in a day for 54 years.

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