cricizen kane

I was prompted by the recent resumption of near-normal Test cricket in New Zealand, and in particular by the record-breaking feats of Kane Williamson, to revisit a couple of previous posts featuring deep cricket stat-nerdery and do my best to out-nerd them in some way.

Williamson's innings of 238 against Pakistan in Christchurch was of particular interest to me as it was the first innings of 238 in the 145-year history of Test cricket. You may recall my post from a few years back (January 2013 to be precise) about the esoteric study of yet-to-be-made individual innings scores in Test cricket, and the subsequent flurry of pant-moistening excitement in late 2015 when several entries on that list were knocked off in quick succession. 

Since the compilation of my original list by painstaking manual methods in 2013 I have developed some fiendishly clever automated methods for extracting statistics related to this subject, and I am both proud and, yes, all right, slightly aroused to present some of the results here.

The first thing to say is that there was an error in my original list: the inclusion of 114 as a score which was once the lowest un-made score in a Test match was an error, and the first occurrence of that score was not by Herbert Sutcliffe in 1929 but by Jack Hearne in 1912 (Sutcliffe's innings was actually the fourth 114 in Test history). So the revised progression looks like this:

Score	Player	Date	Match	Span (time)	Span (Tests)
100	JT Tyldesley	3rd July 1905	ENG v AUS	28y 110d	84
110	WH Ponsford	19th December 1924	AUS v ENG	19y 169d	73
125	PGV van der Bijl	3rd March 1939	RSA v ENG	9y 261d	90
139	ED Weekes	11th April 1955	WI v AUS	16y 39d	133
171	IR Redpath	11th December 1970	AUS v ENG	15y 244d	271
186	Zaheer Abbas	23rd December 1982	PAK v IND	12y 12d	267
199	Mudassar Nazar	24th October 1984	PAK v IND	1y 306d	54
218	SV Manjrekar	1st December 1989	IND v PAK	5y 38d	134
224	VG Kambli	19th February 1993	IND v ENG	2y 80d	84
228	HH Gibbs	2nd January 2003	RSA v PAK	9y 318d	423

The five lowest "missing" scores in Tests are now 229, 252, 265, 272 and 273. The last ten innings which plugged a gap on the list were as follows:

Score	Player	Team	Opposition	Date	Venue
238	KS Williamson	New Zealand	Pakistan	03/01/2021	Christchurch
335*	DA Warner	Australia	Pakistan	29/11/2019	Adelaide
264*	TWM Latham	New Zealand	Sri Lanka	15/12/2018	Wellington
303*	KK Nair	India	England	16/12/2016	Chennai
269*	AC Voges	Australia	West Indies	10/12/2015	Hobart
290	LRPL Taylor	New Zealand	Australia	13/11/2015	Perth
245	Shoaib Malik	Pakistan	England	13/10/2015	Abu Dhabi
263	AN Cook	England	Pakistan	13/10/2015	Abu Dhabi
294	AN Cook	England	India	10/08/2011	Birmingham
293	V Sehwag	India	Sri Lanka	02/12/2009	Mumbai (BS)

At the other end of the scale, multiple occurrences of the same score for the same batsman: the highest individual score to be made more than once by the same batsman is 203, by Shoaib Mohammad and Shivnarine Chanderpaul (twice each), the highest individual score to be made three times by the same player is 158 by Kevin Pietersen, the highest individual score to be made four times by the same player is 105 by Alastair Cook and the only batsman to make the same individual score on five separate occasions is Virat Kohli with 103.

The only two instances in Test history of a batsman making two identical scores in excess of 100 in the same Test match were a pair of 105s by Sri Lanka's Duleep Mendis in 1982 and a pair of 101s by Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq in 2014, the second of those 101s being at the time the joint-fastest century in Test history in just 56 balls (New Zealand's Brendon McCullum has since taken sole possession of the record).