abu dhabi doo

One cricket stat that seems to have slipped under my radar is the remarkable achievement of Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq in Abu Dhabi in November last year - I was going to say "last winter", but those terms are pretty meaningless in Abu Dhabi - equalling Sir Vivian Richards' record for the fastest Test century by clouting one off just 56 balls.

As a tribute to people hitting Test centuries at express speed, here's another table for you: people who have hit the most Test hundreds at a run a ball or greater (or, to put it another way, off 100 balls or fewer). The dozen listed here are those who did it more than once. No real surprises with most of the names on the list, indeed I could have probably given you the top two with a good degree of confidence before compiling the list (for which the source data is here).

Player	Country	Number of 100s	Fastest (balls)
Virender Sehwag	India	7	78
Adam Gilchrist	Australia	6	57
Chris Gayle	West Indies	4	70
Brian Lara	West Indies	3	77
Brendon McCullum	New Zealand	3	74
Shahid Afridi	Pakistan	3	78
Ian Botham	England	3	86
Kapil Dev	India	3	74
Tamim Iqbal	Bangladesh	2	94
Mohammad Azharuddin	India	2	74
Ross Taylor	New Zealand	2	81
David Warner	Australia	2	69

It won't have escaped your notice that most of those people are relatively recent - Botham and Kapil Dev take you back to the early 1980s, but that's about it. As with this list (which you'll notice Misbah also features on), that's partly because balls-faced information is increasingly sketchy the further back you go, but also just because the game is played at a relatively breakneck speed these days - the influence of all that one-day and Twenty20 cricket, no doubt, as well as more mundane things like bigger, fitter players, bigger bats, that sort of thing. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's just a thing.

the kumars at no. 57.40

Here's a quick round-up of statistical nuggetry on the retirement of two admirably nuggety left-handers, Kumar Sangakkara of Sri Lanka and Shivnarine Chanderpaul of the West Indies. Slightly different circumstances surrounding their departures: Sangakkara's planned in advance and allowing the tearful valedictory bat-wave on his departure from the crease for the last time, Chanderpaul's enforced by West Indies management (rather like Brian Lara before him) after a run of low scores, and denying him the chance to go out on his own terms, valedictory bat-wave and all.

By an odd coincidence Sangakkara, Lara and Chanderpaul occupy three adjacent spots (5th, 6th and 7th) on the overall Test run-scorers list, which means that they are also the 1st, 2nd and 3rd most prolific left-handed batsmen in Test history - Allan Border, Alastair Cook, Graeme Smith, Matthew Hayden, David Gower, Garry Sobers and Justin Langer make up the rest of the top ten. Since Langer is 30th overall on the list, you can see that exactly one-third of the top 30 batsmen are left-handed, which gives you an insight into their prevalence in comparison to the prevalence of left-handedness in the population at large (about 10%). There is a catch here, though, which is that not all players who bat left-handed are left-handed in the traditional sense, i.e. doing the "normal" stuff like writing with their left hand. Gower and Lara, for instance, were left-handed batsman and right-handed writers (and occasional bowlers); conversely, Tendulkar batted and bowled right-handed and wrote with his left hand.

Both retirements also necessitate some revision of my obscure hierarchy of batting averages: Sangakkara ends Jacques Kallis' 18-month tenure on the overall list by replacing him. It's worth re-iterating the point of these lists: for each person appearing on it, no-one who has come later has finished with a higher average.

Player	Year	Average
Kumar Sangakkara	2015	57.40
Garfield Sobers	1974	57.78
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

As you can see, Sangakkara wasn't that far from removing Garry Sobers from the list - before his last two matches against India he was averaging 58.04, and only needed to score 133 runs in his last match (rather than the 50 he actually did score) to finish with an average in excess of Sobers'. The 325 runs he would have needed to score to displace Ken Barrington would have been a tall order, and the 9240 runs he would have needed to score to displace Don Bradman definitely would have been.. Nonetheless he collapses the Sri Lankan list to a single entry, just as Kallis and Sachin Tendulkar did for their respective countries on their retirements. I should add, just for completeness, that Sangakkara's old mucker Mahela Jayawardene would have been occupying the Sri Lankan list on his own since his retirement in 2014 if I'd been scrupulous about keeping things up-to-date.

Chanderpaul still talks up his chances of a return to Test cricket, but I think we're pretty safe in assuming that that won't happen, just as we are for Kevin Pietersen of England. I therefore think it's safe to include them on their respective countries' lists. Chanderpaul displaces his old team-mate Ramnaresh Sarwan for West Indies, and Pietersen displaces everyone post-Boycott for England. Michael Clarke's retirement at the end of the recent Ashes series slots him in at the end of the Australian list.

England

Player	Year	Average
Kevin Pietersen	2014	47.28
Geoff Boycott	1982	47.72
Ted Dexter	1968	47.89
Ken Barrington	1968	58.67
Herbert Sutcliffe	1935	60.73

Australia

Player	Year	Average
Michael Clarke	2015	49.10
Mike Hussey	2013	51.52
Ricky Ponting	2012	51.85
Greg Chappell	1984	53.86
Don Bradman	1948	99.94

South Africa

Player	Year	Average
Jacques Kallis	2013	55.37

India

Player	Year	Average
Sachin Tendulkar	2013	53.78

Pakistan

Player	Year	Average
Mohammad Yousuf	2010	52.29
Javed Miandad	1993	52.57

Sri Lanka

Player	Year	Average
Kumar Sangakkara	2015	57.40

New Zealand

Player	Year	Average
Stephen Fleming	2008	40.06
Mark Richardson	2004	44.77
Martin Crowe	1995	45.36

West Indies

Player	Year	Average
Shivnarine Chanderpaul	2014	51.37
Brian Lara	2006	52.88
Gary Sobers	1974	57.78
Everton Weekes	1958	58.61

Zimbabwe

Player	Year	Average
Andy Flower	2002	51.54

will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I shoot 64

Another major, another round which equalled the major championship scoring record for an individual round but didn't break it. You might expect that a major tournament which resulted in a new record for the overall finishing score in relation to par would have been a good candidate for seeing a new single-round record as well, but we didn't get one. Best round of the week was Hiroshi Iwata's 63 on Friday, which necessitates another revision to my list of major-championship 63s. Here's the up-to-date list:

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Johnny Miller	US Open	1973	final	WON	Johnny Miller
Bruce Crampton	USPGA	1975	second	2nd	Jack Nicklaus
Mark Hayes	Open	1977	second	tied 9th	Tom Watson
Jack Nicklaus	US Open	1980	first	WON	Jack Nicklaus
Tom Weiskopf	US Open	1980	first	37th	Jack Nicklaus
Isao Aoki	Open	1980	third	tied 12th	Tom Watson
Raymond Floyd	USPGA	1982	first	WON	Raymond Floyd
Gary Player	USPGA	1984	second	tied 2nd	Lee Trevino
Nick Price	Masters	1986	third	5th	Jack Nicklaus
Greg Norman	Open	1986	second	WON	Greg Norman
Paul Broadhurst	Open	1990	third	tied 12th	Nick Faldo
Jodie Mudd	Open	1991	final	tied 5th	Ian Baker-Finch
Nick Faldo	Open	1993	second	2nd	Greg Norman
Payne Stewart	Open	1993	final	12th	Greg Norman
Vijay Singh	USPGA	1993	second	4th	Paul Azinger
Michael Bradley	USPGA	1995	first	tied 54th	Steve Elkington
Brad Faxon	USPGA	1995	final	5th	Steve Elkington
Greg Norman	Masters	1996	first	2nd	Nick Faldo
Jose Maria Olazabal	USPGA	2000	third	tied 4th	Tiger Woods
Mark O’Meara	USPGA	2001	second	tied 22nd	David Toms
Vijay Singh	US Open	2003	second	tied 20th	Jim Furyk
Thomas Bjorn	USPGA	2005	third	tied 2nd	Phil Mickelson
Tiger Woods	USPGA	2007	second	WON	Tiger Woods
Rory McIlroy	Open	2010	first	tied 3rd	Louis Oosthuizen
Steve Stricker	USPGA	2011	first	tied 12th	Keegan Bradley
Jason Dufner	USPGA	2013	second	WON	Jason Dufner
Hiroshi Iwata	USPGA	2015	second	tied 21st	Jason Day

A couple of further thoughts occurred to me: firstly that you can - broadly speaking - make a 63 in two ways: either by being on for a 64 and then holing a birdie putt at the last, or by needing a par for a 63 and getting it. Iwata was in the second group, and he got there by getting up and down for par from short of the 18th green. But there must be a subset of players in the second group who two-putted for a par, and therefore had a putt for a 62. I know, for instance, that the most recent two players on the list, Stricker and Dufner, fall into this category, and both putts were very makeable ones. These two interesting articles suggest that there were people who had shorter putts than that for 62s: Mark Hayes in 1977 had a six-footer for par on the last and missed, Greg Norman three-putted the last green in 1986, the crucial putt being from around five feet, and most surprisingly of all the great Jack Nicklaus had a putt of no more than two or three feet for a birdie on the 18th at Baltusrol in 1980 and missed it. That's one criterion for "closeness" to a 62, another would be how close what turned out to be the penultimate putt came to going in. Johnny Miller in 1973, Tiger Woods in 2007 and Nick Price in 1986 all had putts that got a pretty good portion of the hole before lipping out; Price claims his did a full circuit of the hole and still stayed out, though that story may have grown a bit in the telling, as war stories do.

My second thought was: at some point this 27-item list is going to be collapsed to a single item, whenever (as is pretty much bound to happen eventually) someone holes one of those putts for a 62 (or something even lower). But there must have been a point just before the 1973 US Open when there was a similar multiple-item list in existence featuring a whole host of players who'd shot 64 in a major championship. I wonder if it's possible to reconstruct that list?

Well, probably, but I'm not about to present you with anything that I'm claiming is complete or definitive. What I can tell you is as follows:

• The first player to shoot 64 in a major championship was Lloyd Mangrum in the first round of the 1940 Masters, where he eventually finished second.
• The first player to shoot 64 at the US Open was Lee Mackey jr in the first round in 1950; he followed that with 81-75-77 and eventually finished 25th.
• The first player to shoot 64 at the USPGA was Bobby Nichols in the first round in 1964; he went on to win the tournament.
• The man Nichols beat into second place in 1964, Jack Nicklaus, got there by shooting a 64 in the final round.
• In the very next major, the 1965 Masters, Nicklaus shot another 64, in the third round this time, and went on to win the tournament.
• Mark Hayes' 63 in the second round of the 1977 Open set a new record for that championship, beating the venerable previous record of 65 set by Henry Cotton in 1934. So what that means is that there was never a 64 shot at the Open that would have qualified for the list - needless to say there have been plenty of Open 64s subsequent to Hayes' 63, but of course they don't count.

So all of those would have been on the list, but I couldn't say whether there would have been any others. Chances are there probably were, but without trawling through the entire database of major championship results I can't be sure. It is almost certain, however, that Jack Nicklaus will be the only person to have featured on both lists. Obviously it follows that before the 1940 Masters there would have been a similar list of 65s with at least one entry on it, Cotton's round at the Open in 1934. Good luck with that one.

incidental music spot of the day

The Stake by the Steve Miller Band during Sky Sports' coverage of the USPGA championship from Whistling Straits. Cracking tune, mildly controversial at the time because of its riff's close resemblance to that of Rocky Mountain Way by Joe Walsh, released a few years earlier. Here's a live rendition of The Stake from March of this year which demonstrates that despite being nearly 72 Miller a) still knows how to rock out and b) has more hair than I do.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Diminutive Swedish golfer and 2015 Memorial Tournament winner David Lingmerth, and comedian, playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber.

great big number twos

I was interested to discover which songs had kept the five Queen number 2 hits I referred to in the previous post off the top slot, and, having done that, made the unwarranted inference that you'd be interested too. Well, whatever, I've done the research now so you're getting it anyway.

• Killer Queen spent two weeks at number two, the weeks of 10th and 17th November 1974, for both of which it was kept off the top spot by David Essex's Gonna Make You A Star.
• Somebody To Love was kept off the top spot by Showaddywaddy's Under The Moon Of Love for one week, 5th December 1976.
• The double A-side of We Are The Champions and We Will Rock You spent three weeks at number 2, and was kept off the top spot for the first two of those (13th November and 20th November 1977) by Abba's Name Of The Game, and then, just as Name Of The Game dropped down the chart the following week, was leapfrogged by the dreaded Mull Of Kintyre.
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love spent two weeks at number 2, 18th and 25th November 1979, for both of which it was kept off the top spot by Dr Hook's When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman. 
• Radio Ga Ga spent two weeks at number 2, 5th and 12th February 1984, for both of which it was kept off the top spot by Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax. 

Personally I wouldn't feel able to say that any of the number 1's listed there were better than the song they kept at number 2, but there's a long and glorious history of this in the UK charts, from The Beatles' Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever double A-side being thwarted by Englebert Humperdinck's Please Release Me to Ultravox's Vienna meeting a similar fate at the hands of Joe Dolce Music Theatre's Shaddap You Face. This particular injustice was voted the worst of all time in a poll by Radio 2 a couple of years ago. 

beelzebub has a blogging platform put aside for me

So there we were, the wife and I, all prepared to have an early night and watch something edifying on the TV, maybe something from our extensive DVD collection like Citizen Kane or The Seventh Seal or maybe the entire Three Colours trilogy. But, instead, we got caught up watching The Nation's Favourite Queen Song, like a high society couple on the way to a romantic dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant being lured into an alleyway by a syphilitic tramp waving a lukewarm KFC bargain bucket laced with crack.

Now obviously you'll have instant recall of my blog posts from eight years ago, so you'll recall this one wherein I cited Queen's A Day At The Races as one of the key albums of my formative years (i.e. my parents owned a copy). That album came out in 1976; my period of proper full-on Queenmania was a bit later and probably ran for two or three years between about 1983 and 1985. During that period I bought every album they'd released up to that point (yeah, even the Flash Gordon soundtrack). The Works was the only proper album that came out during that period and its major singles Radio Ga Ga and I Want To Break Free were probably the band's last great moments before the inevitable decline set in - One Vision and A Kind Of Magic are fine songs, but the accompanying album has a lot of fairly uninspiring filler off the Highlander soundtrack, and by the time of their next proper album The Miracle in 1989 I'd gone to university and had my head turned good and proper by the musical delights on offer.

Anyway, the point of mentioning this sort of TV show is always to bitch about the selections that were made, so here goes:

• Firstly, there's far too much stuff from after A Kind Of Magic - my (possibly controversial) view is that pretty much everything after 1986 is best forgotten about, so 3 out of 20 from this period is too much, especially when two of them (The Show Must Go On and These Are The Days Of Our Lives) are clearly unavoidably associated with Freddie Mercury's death, and therefore immune from criticism.
• I would have had Somebody To Love in my top three, or even two, or even possibly one. Number ten is definitely too low, anyway.
• Christ knows what Who Wants To Live Forever is doing in this company; I can only assume this is another one that people have decided they like because the lyrical theme foreshadows Mercury's eventual death in some way, rather than because it's, y'know, any good. It's A Hard Life is a pretty ordinary song to be in a top 20 as well, especially at the expense of, say, Fat Bottomed Girls, which despite being toe-curlingly politically incorrect is irresistibly good fun.
• Some minor quibbles about the order of other entries: I Want To Break Free being above Killer Queen is a bit of a nonsense, as is Under Pressure being above Another One Bites The Dust. Nice to see both entries from this list getting a look in, although to be honest Under Pressure is a bit of a horrible mess of a song. I've always thought Don't Stop Me Now was over-rated as well, but I think people like that whole I Will Survive/I Am What I Am slightly camp self-empowerment thing.
• Since it was almost inevitable that Bohemian Rhapsody would be number one, the race was really to see what would make number two, and as it happens I think We Will Rock You is an excellent choice. The sparse instrumentation and brevity (just under two minutes) mean it's worn better over the years than some of the more overblown stuff. Obviously the magic bit is at the end, where we get a little whine of guitar drone through the last chorus, the big powerchord, and then an "all right" from Mercury as he hands the song over to Brian May's closing solo. Even the solo itself is interesting (guitar nerdery alert), since as well as being a little masterpiece of brevity it's an example of a different, cleaner, more chiming guitar sound May used on 1977's News Of The World and pretty much nowhere else. The criminally underrated minor single Spread Your Wings features a similar sound (and clearly had its video shot on the same day) as well as featuring the principal guitar solo right at the end of the song. By the next album (Don't Stop Me Now, for instance) we were back to the bigger, syrupy, chorus-y sound, as well as having the solo in the middle of the song. 
• Speaking of things getting to number two, Queen are an interesting example of a group who had a lot of number 2 hits but precious few number 1's, during their main period, anyway. Between 1974 and 1984 they had five number 2's (Killer Queen, Somebody To Love, We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Radio Ga Ga), and two number 1's, Bohemian Rhapsody and Under Pressure, and you could argue that's only one-and-a-half, really. A piece of associated trivia: Creedence Clearwater Revival had five number 2 hits on the US singles charts, but never a number 1, although Bad Moon Rising was number 1 in the UK in 1969.

land of confuzhion

The English language is a great thing, don't get me wrong, but it has its limitations. Do you mean funny ha ha or funny peculiar? Do you mean hot as in high temperature or hot as in it's got a lot of chillies in it? There's that sort of thing, but there's also some more basic stuff like being able to unambiguously render certain sounds. So any word with a "th" at the start, for instance, relies solely on prior knowledge and perhaps some context to determine whether it's a soft "th" (as in, say, "thought" or "theme") or a hard one (as in, say, "this" or "that"), whereas, for instance, Welsh can easily distinguish between them by using "th" for the soft one and "dd" for the hard ("voiced", more accurately) one.

The example which came up today was as follows: like many offices the one I work in doesn't enforce a rigid suit-and-tie regime, but equally (dress down Fridays aside) you can't just rock up in jeans and a hilarious T-shirt with some near-the-knuckle slogan on it. Some sort of casual shirt/chinos combo is the usual strategy, and the term "business casual" has sprung up to describe it. That's all fine, but there's a natural tendency to want to abbreviate, and the obvious abbreviation here is just to retain the first syllable of each word. So that would be biz, erm....well, there's a problem here, isn't there? It turns out there is no letter combination that will unambiguously render the sound of the "s" from the middle of "casual".

Those who have tried to do it have taken one of a number of approaches; well, I say "a number", I think there are three, as follows:

• "biz cas" - just shorten "casual" without any thought to the resulting pronunciation; this is obviously highly unsatisfactory;
• "biz caj" - I see what they've tried to do here, but it looks weird and the sound still isn't quite right;
• "biz caz" - probably the closest sound-wise, but still not quite right, unless you happen to pronounce "casual" as "caz-yoo-wul" in which case a) this is going to be the one for you and b) what is wrong with you?

I think the answer is probably to take a cue from our Russian friends and adopt the use of "zh" to render this particular consonant sound. So you'd render it as "biz cazh", as in: Marshal Zhukov and Dr. Zhivago had a bit of leizh time, so they dressed up in biz cazh, much to their mutual pleazh.