• A Sri Lankan batsman caused a midair scare in 2013 when he tried to open a cabin door on a flight from St Lucia to Gatwick. Returning from the Sri Lankan A tour of the West Indies, Ramith Rambukwella said he mistook a cabin door for the toilet door. According to a passenger, “Suddenly he came over and tried to open the cabin door several times. It went on for a few minutes. He was pulling quite heavily. The flight attendants came running down the aisle and tried to calm him down. He seemed quite disorientated.”
• International economist Mervyn King played cricket at school, once taking seven wickets before the lunch break in a match in 1965. His next five-wicket haul – 5-15 in a limited-over match – came 38 years later in 2003, the year he was appointed Governor of the Bank of England: “I claim a record for the longest time between successive five-fors.”
• Afghanistan all-rounder Mohammad Nabi set a new benchmark in world cricket in 2015 when he became the first player to appear in each of a country’s first 50 one-day internationals. He was there for Afghanistan’s first ODI – against Scotland at Benoni in 2009 – and was captain in its 50th, against New Zealand at Napier in the 2015 World Cup.
• All-rounder Jimmy Allan had the unusual experience in 1966 of playing both for and against the same county in consecutive first-class matches. After turning out for Warwickshire in a County Championship match against Glamorgan at Swansea, he then played for Scotland – a team he had represented since 1954 – against Warwickshire at Edgbaston three days later.
• Coinciding with the West Indies’ 500th Test match, senior batsman Shivnarine Chanderpaul became the first cricketer to witness 500 dismissals from the other end. In the first innings of the second Test against Bangladesh at Gros Islet in 2014, the removal of Jermaine Blackwood was the 500th time Chanderpaul had seen one of his team-mates dismissed while batting. For his part, Chanderpaul kept his own wicket intact both times, finishing the match with two unbeaten scores of 84 and 101.
• Umpiring history was made when England hosted India at The Oval in 2014 with the two men in the middle, the TV umpire, the reserve umpire and match referee all being former Test players. Sri Lanka’s Kumar Dharmasena and Paul Reiffel were the umpires, England’s Tim Robinson and Neil Mallender occupied the positions of TV umpire and reserve umpire respectively, while Sri Lanka’s Ranjan Madugalle presided over his 150th Test as referee.
• A squabble over a cricket match on TV and smoking saw the arrival of the riot squad to a pub in Warwickshire in 2007. John Vaughan had been watching the last few minutes of a cricket match on the pub TV when someone changed the channel to football. When his pleas to staff to put the cricket back on failed, he decided to light up a cigarette in defiance of a smoking ban: “The cricket only had ten minutes left, but the football wasn’t even going to start for another 45 minutes. We complained but nothing happened. So I decided to light up out of protest. They pressed a panic button and the next thing I knew, there were six policemen in the pub and two outside.”
• A former Zimbabwe cricketer had a close encounter with a crocodile in 2013. Guy Whitall – who appeared in 46 Tests – lived to tell the tale of being asleep one night, not knowing that an eight-foot crocodile had been hiding under his bed: “The really disconcerting thing about the whole episode is the fact that I was sitting on the edge of the bed that morning, barefoot and just centimetres away from the croc. Crocodiles are experts at hiding, that’s why they have survived on Earth for so long and why they are the ultimate killers in water.”
• During a County Championship match at Huddersfield in 1919, Yorkshire’s 12th man fielded for the opposition and caught four of his team-mates in the first innings. Billy Williams appeared on the field in the match for Leicestershire, taking five substitute catches in all.
• In 2007, Shane Warne became the first cricketer in philatelic history to be honoured with a series of stamps. The Caribbean nation of Grenada commissioned the set, a distinction which, at the time, had not even been bestowed upon one of its own citizens. Later in the same year, Sri Lanka’s philatelic service released a stamp shaped like a cricket ball commemorating Muttiah Muralitharan’s feat of breaking Warne’s record of most Test match wickets.
• Three players named S. Banerjee have played Test cricket for India, with each making just one appearance. S.A. Banerjee played in his one and only Test against the West Indies at Kolkata in 1948/49; S.N. Banerjee’s only Test came against the same opposition, at Mumbai, in the same series, while S.T. Banerjee played against Australia at Sydney in 1991/92.
• The West Indies began its tour of New Zealand in 2013/14 with just five players. With the rest of the squad in India, the West Indians included six New Zealanders – Jeet Raval, Aaron Redmond, Sam Wells, Robert O’Donnell, Tim Johnston and Ili Tugaga – in its tour opener against a New Zealand XI at Lincoln.
• A large number of villages across northern India were banned from playing cricket in 2007, because it was deemed a “meaningless game”. Village elders issued a decree stating that no one was permitted to play cricket or watch matches on television, adding that cricket led young people into gambling.
• In between two first-class matches for Scotland, Robert Clark was a crew member on board explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance that sank in the Antarctic in 1915. A biologist, Clark made his first-class debut against Ireland in Dublin in 1912, appearing in his final match 12 years later, against the South Africans, in Glasgow in 1924.
• English adventurer Bear Grylls, who was appointed Britain’s Chief Scout in 2009, has a family connection with first-class cricket. His maternal grandfather was Neville Ford, who appeared in 75 first-class matches, for Derbyshire, Middlesex and Oxford University in the 1920s and 30s.
• Former New Zealand wicketkeeper Adam Parore was on top of the world in 2011 after successfully scaling the world’s tallest mountain. Suffering altitude sickness and battling poor weather conditions, Parore made it to the top of Mount Everest in a climb that raised money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.
• The famed British astronomer Patrick Moore listed cricket as his favourite sport. A bowler by trade, he regarded his “finest hour” on the cricketing field when he came in to bat at No.11 with his team floundering at 27/9 and scored a match-winning 63. He claimed nine wickets in an innings on three occasions in village cricket, but never quite took all ten: “I was playing in a match where I had nine for 45. In came the No. 11 who was no batsman at all. The first ball shaved the stumps. He blocked the next, then called for a run and ran himself out! He bought me a large drink after the game.” Sir Patrick’s final game came at the age of 77, in which he took 6-41.
• Play in a club match in Hampshire in 1982 included an unscheduled break to accommodate the landing of a hot-air balloon. After running out of fuel, it came to rest in between the stumps during the Curdridge-Medstead match near Southampton.
• In 2005, a Pakistani businessman offered the Pakistan Cricket Board £1m if it would pick him to play against India. The Karachi newspaper The News revealed that the London-based M. Jamshaid had made the same offer a number of times, all to no avail.
A hot-air balloon makes its way over a match between Oxford University and Middlesex
• Henry Edward Manning, the Archbishop of Westminster between 1865 and 1892, has a special place in cricket history. The future Cardinal Manning played for Harrow against Winchester at Lord’s in 1825, the first game between the two schools.
• England batsman Geoff Pullar appeared in a record 16 Tests before taking a catch in his 17th, against Pakistan at Lahore in 1961/62. The Lancashire batsman – who made 75 on his Test debut and had a highest score of 175 – took only two catches in the field in his 28-Test-match career.
• When Kumar Sangakkara played in a Twenty20 fixture against Bangladesh at Pallekele in 2012/13, he became the first player to reach the milestone of 500 international matches without ever taking a wicket. In 117 Tests, 340 one-day internationals and 43 Twenty20 internationals, the Sri Lankan batsman had only delivered 78 balls in three innings since his debut in 2000. His only wicket in his entire career of 764 other matches – first-class, List A and Twenty20s – up to that point had been Zimbabwe A batsman Elton Chigumbura, at Harare in 2004.
• A computer cricket game smashed its way to the top of the charts in England just two weeks after its release in 2005. Labelled the “best cricket game on PS2” by the PlayStation 2 magazine, Brian Lara International Cricket became the first cricket game to capture the No. 1 spot on the UK All-Formats chart since the bestseller list began in 1997.
• During Surrey’s loss to Hampshire in a 2006 C&G Trophy one-day match at Croydon, a shot off the bat of Jonathan Batty hit the three-year-old son of his team-mate Ali Brown in the head. The Hampshire physiotherapist was on hand and administered first aid.
• After being banned for abusing a team-mate in a match in England in 1938, an 84-year-old retired doctor was allowed back in to the club 70 years later. Dennis Hibbert had been banned by the Kimberley Institute Cricket Club after calling a fielder a “big fat fool”. When Hibbert turned up to a club function in 2008, it was pointed out by the club’s secretary Jim Dymond that his ban had never been annulled: “It must be the longest on record.”
• The Mauritius-born Owen Cowley appeared for two states but never played a first-class match on Australian soil. Cowley played in 11 matches on two tours of New Zealand – seven matches for New South Wales in 1893/94 and four for Queensland in 1896/97.
• When Canterbury were playing Central Districts in a first-class match at New Plymouth in 2009/10, one player from each side was called up by New Zealand for international duty. After scoring an unbeaten 227 and sharing an unbroken stand of 379 for Canterbury, Shanan Stewart left the game at lunch on day four, while fast bowler Michael Mason was withdrawn on day two. Seventeen-year-old Adam Milne, making his first-class debut in place of Mason, hit the winning runs for Central Districts with two balls to spare.
• A cricket fan attending the England-New Zealand one-day international at Trent Bridge in 2013 went home £50,000 richer after pulling off a bowling challenge during a break in play. Set the task of hitting the stumps with his first ball, then two stumps with his second ball and a single stump with his third, 50-year-old Chris Newell managed the feat in front of a 16,000-strong crowd in Nottingham: “I’m originally from Yorkshire, so I guess there’s a bit of Fred Trueman in there somewhere.”
• During the Pakistan A tour of England in 1997, two future Test players made their first-class debuts at the age of 15. Shoaib Malik – who made his Test debut in 2001/02 – was 15 years and 151 days old on the first day of his first first-class match, against Nottinghamshire. A week later, Irfan Fazil – who later appeared in a single Test match in 1999/2000 – made his first-class debut against MCC at Shenley, aged 15 years and 249 days.
• G.H. Hardy, a prominent British mathematician, once described German counterpart David Hilbert as “the Don Bradman of mathematics”. Found amongst Hardy’s possessions after his death in 1947 were a number of cricket teams he’d jotted down on scraps of paper. One of the teams was, in batting order, Jack Hobbs, Archimedes, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Napoléon Bonaparte (captain), Henry Ford, Plato, Ludwig van Beethoven, boxer Jack Johnson, Jesus Christ and Cleopatra.
• When Fiji toured New Zealand in 1953/54, two of their players were just 5ft 1in tall. Fijian wicketkeeper Patrick Raddock and batsman Naitini Tuiyau are amongst the shortest players in first-class cricket history, with both appearing in their final first-class match together, against Auckland at Eden Park.
• An Indian-born businessman who assumed the top job at Microsoft in 2014 attributed his rise in the corporate world to cricket. Satya Nadella became the third CEO of the world’s largest software maker: “I think playing cricket taught me more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout my career.”
• Google paid tribute to a cricketer on its homepage in 2013. On 5 September, the internet search engine noted the 187th birthday of John Wisden, who appeared in 187 first-class matches.
• During the 1990s, Sachin Tendulkar appeared in a record number of consecutive international matches. Between April 1990 and April 1998, he played in 239 matches in a row – 54 Tests and 185 one-day internationals.
• A prominent trade union official who was struck down by an influenza pandemic in 1919 scored a century on his first-class debut. Frank Hyett, who played a major role in the formation of the Australian Railways Union, scored an unbeaten 108 at No. 10 for Victoria against Tasmania at the MCG in 1914/15.
• Wellington fast bowler Ili Tugaga was suspended for six weeks in 2010 after lying to his club to fulfil a modelling contract in the United States. He told his club coach he needed a leave of absence to visit a sick relative, but instead travelled to San Francisco to further his modelling career.
• A “fishy” dismissal took place in a junior match in England in 2011, when Toby Codd was caught by Alex Bass off the bowling of Robert Pike. The dismissal Codd c Bass b Pike 2 can be found in the scorebook of the under-13s match between Devon and Hampshire in Taunton.
• A piece of cheese held up play in a Test match in England in 2014. After becoming the third victim of a Test match hat-trick by Stuart Broad at Leeds, Sri Lanka’s No. 10 Shaminda Eranga was struck by a Mini Babybel thrown by a spectator. Play was halted for a few minutes with the perpetrator ejected from the ground.
A press clipping from 1953, and Princess Margaret meets members of the West Indies cricket squad in 1955
• When asked to nominate the “three most beautiful things in England”, Australian Test all-rounder Keith Miller came up with the hills of Derbyshire, the leg sweep of Denis Compton and Princess Margaret. Once romantically linked with Miller, according to previously secret documents published in 2013, Princess Margaret was known to be “happy watching cricket for a reasonable length of time”.
• The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry played in a charity cricket match at Windsor Castle in 2014 that also featured former Test cricketers such as Azhar Mahmood and Devon Malcolm. Staged to raise awareness of illegal wildlife trading, Prince Harry was among the wicket-takers with his side United for Wildlife dismissing The Royal Household for 145.
Prince Harry, the cricketer, in a Twenty20 match at Windsor Castle in 2014
• To mark a call by Pakistan’s Chief Justice to end discrimination against the country’s eunuch population in 2009, a special cricket match was played in the southern city of Sukkur. A team of eunuchs took on a team of so-called “normal men” and came out on top claiming victory. In the same year, a team of HIV-positive players from Pakistan also took to the field for the first time. Said to be the world’s first such side, they attained a seven-wicket victory over a youth club from Hyderabad.
• Pakistan’s blind cricketers were barred from entering Britain in 2009 to compete in the Blind World Cup after immigration authorities suggested they might do a runner. The Pakistan Blind Cricket Council chairman Syed Sultan Shah described the refusal of visas as ridiculous: “It is insulting. How can a blind man run away when he can’t go anywhere without help?”
• In the Auckland Test match against India in 2013/14, Indian-born Ish Sodhi was dismissed by the same combination in each innings. Caught by Rohit Sharma off Ishant Sharma, Sodhi became the first player in Test history to be dismissed in both innings of a match by a pair of players with the same surname.
• For the 1965 Test series between England and South Africa, both of the captains, Mike Smith and Peter van der Merwe, wore glasses. A unique occurrence in Tests, other bespectacled captains include Walter Hadlee, Pankaj Roy, the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, Zaheer Abbas, Clive Lloyd and Daniel Vettori. The 1965 series featured five players who wore glasses – Smith, van der Merwe, England’s Geoff Boycott and Eddie Barlow and Harry Bromfield for South Africa.
• When Hunter Poon played for Queensland at the MCG in 1923/24, he became the first player of Chinese descent to appear in a first-class match in Australia. During England’s tour of Australia in 1932/33, they played against a Queensland Country team at Toowoomba in which Poona took two good wickets, Herbert Sutcliffe for 19 and Gubby Allen for a duck.
• Warwickshire County Cricket Club and the local police joined forces in 2014 to improve pitches at Edgbaston. The club used hot lamps confiscated by West Midlands Police from cannabis growers in the region to promote grass growth on the ground’s playing surface.
• Appearing in his final match, South Africa’s Jacques Kallis became only the second fielder to take 200 catches in Test cricket. In his 166th Test, Kallis passed the milestone on 27 December during the second Test against India at Durban in 2013/14. In 2010/11, India’s Rahul Dravid had become the first to achieve the feat, doing so on the same date and at the same ground.
• Australian umpire Bill Smyth received an appeal from the very first ball in the first Test in which he stood. A former fast bowler in Melbourne club cricket, Smyth made the first of his four appearances in the middle in an Ashes Test at the MCG in 1962/63: “It has stuck in my mind I got an appeal first ball. The very first delivery was from Fred Trueman and he appealed for a leg before wicket against Bill Lawry and I was quite happy to say, ‘Not out’. Bill Lawry was a left-handed batsman and the ball was pitched outside his leg stump. Freddy Trueman knew it because he came back and said, leaving the language out of it, ‘Just making sure you’re awake!’”
Coincidentally, Smyth’s first and last first-class matches as an umpire coincided with those of Lawry as a player.
• During the 1894/95 Ashes series, Syd Gregory and Jack Blackham combined for a 154-run stand in the second Test at Sydney, the only 19th-century Australian partnership record that still stands. In 2004, Julian Blackham – the wicketkeeper’s great-great nephew – and Bruce Chapman – Gregory’s great-great nephew – combined to produce a discussion paper for the Australian National University titled The Value of Don Bradman: Additional Revenue in Australian Ashes Tests.
A novelty $100 bank note featuring Don Bradman and a $5 legal tender coin released by the Royal Australian Mint
• Ratilal Parmar is a Sachin Tendulkar fan of some note. A resident of the Gujarat town of Morbi, Parmar has spent a small fortune over the years collecting banknotes with serial numbers that mark significant events and milestones in Tendulkar’s life, including 160312, the date in 2012 that the Little Master scored his 100th international century: “This isn’t easy to do. I knew some people in banks and they would help me find notes matching a particular event. At times, I would have to plead with them.”
• Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan appeared in close to 500 international matches without captaining his side. A record number, he played in 495 matches – 133 Tests, 350 one-day internationals and 12 Twenty20 internationals.
• A former Australian captain had a flower named after him in the year he retired from Test match cricket. The Greg Chappell rose, a small apricot-coloured hybrid tea rose, was introduced to the Australian market in 1984. Another Australian captain was similarly honoured in 2002, with the release of the dark red Sir Donald Bradman Rose (pictured).
• On his first-class debut in 1949, Fred Titmus played in the same Middlesex XI as Horace Brearley who was making his final appearance. When Titmus played in his final first-class match 33 years later, he played under the captaincy of Horace’s son, Mike Brearley.
• In the wake of a pub altercation with an England batsman ahead of the 2013 Ashes, American wrestling icon Hulk Hogan challenged Australia’s David Warner to a rumble. In a video sponsored by a betting company, Hogan predicted England would thrash Australia 5-0, and challenged Warner to take him on: “David Warner, if you’re watching and I know you are brother, next time you wanna throw a punch, how about picking a fight with someone that’s got 24-inch pythons [his biceps].”
• Ed Cowan was called from the members’ bar at the SCG in 2005 to act as a substitute fielder for Australia. On the field for an injured Michael Clarke during the third Test against Pakistan, Cowan later refused to accept the gear he’d been wearing. Cowan – who made his Test debut in 2011/12 – said at the time he hadn’t yet deserved such an honour: “They’re sacred things in Australian cricket and you need to earn them. That culture of earning your place is deeply ingrained into you.”
From the Cowan family photo album – a young Ed Cowan obtaining the autograph of Pakistan legend Imran Khan
• Stephen Russell, a captain of Oxford University at first-class level, later became a captain of industry. In 1967 – his final year of first-class cricket – Russell made his debut for Surrey and also joined Boots, a UK pharmaceutical chain that he later headed.
• Following the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, it emerged that children had lost many a cricket ball hit into the compound of the al-Qaeda leader who lived in the Pakistan town of Abbottabad. Instead of allowing the children to retrieve the balls, and possibly discover bin Laden, locals say they were given money: “If a ball went into bin Laden’s compound the children would not be allowed to get it.”
Bin Laden’s compound was just a short distance from a village cricket ground, with Abbottabad a participant in Pakistan’s first-class competition, the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy. The last first-class match in the town prior to the assassination of bin Laden produced a 500-run total by the opposition and the first instance of a 300-run partnership at the ground. The Karachi Whites scored 583/3 declared at the Abbottabad Cricket Stadium in 2010/11 with an unbeaten fourth-wicket stand of 332 between Khalid Latif (200*) and Asif Zakir (219*).
• History was made in the summer of 2013/14 when, for the first time, the opposing captains for a Test match both made their 100th appearance. Alastair Cook and Michael Clarke were the history-makers at Perth, with Cook becoming the first player to complete 100 Tests with a career not yet eight years in length, doing so in seven years and nine months. He also beat Sachin Tendulkar as the youngest to reach the milestone at 28 years and 353 days.
When Clarke reached two in the second innings, he and Cook had 15,921 runs and 51 centuries between them in 200 Tests combined, exactly the same set of total of runs and hundreds attained by Tendulkar on his own in his 200 Tests.
Chasing a 504-run victory target, captain Cook was out to the first ball of the innings – his first first-ball duck in a Test – becoming the first player to mark his 100th Test with a golden globe, while Clarke celebrated the occasion with two plum prizes – the ICC Cricketer of the Year award and the Ashes.
• In 2007, Zimbabwe’s cricket authorities ordered a number of players to have a haircut or be dropped. At least three members of the national team – Keith Dabengwa, Tawanda Mupariwa and Christopher Mpofu – were ordered to turn up for duty in short back and sides or face the consequences. Mupariwa resisted initially, submitting an impassioned plea to keep his dreadlocks, but later relented.
• A London resident who had his home on the market in 2001 contacted the Wisden website seeking their assistance, believing that cricket fans might be interested in his somewhat unique piece of real estate. The four-bedroom Victorian terrace house, with a price tag in excess of £400,000, was located at 10 Dulka Road.
• A windfall payment came the way of charity organisation Oxfam in 2010 after acquiring the first four editions of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. A donor had left a box of old books containing the antiquarian cricketing volumes for the charity in the English town of Hertford. The lot fetched £8,500 at auction, with the first edition, published in 1864, realising £3,120.
At an auction in England in 2012, a cricketing-themed car number plate – W15 DEN – went under the hammer for £1,500, almost four times its reserve.
Lancashire’s Peter Lever, Clive Lloyd, Frank Hayes and David Lloyd with umpire Dickie Bird (second from right) on a snow-covered pitch at Buxton in 1975
• When Derbyshire hosted Lancashire at the Park Road Ground in 1975, no play was possible on the second day due to snow. Although the summer of 75 was one of Britain’s hottest on record, a freak storm hit the County Championship match in Buxton – England’s highest town – bringing rain, hail and snow.
The match itself was a one-sided affair with Lancashire declaring at 477/5 after 100 overs and disposing of Derbyshire for 42 and 87. The margin of an innings and 348 runs represented one of the biggest defeats in the history of the County Championship.
• For the first time in history, a one-day international was washed out due to rain in the United Arab Emirates in 2014/15. After 30 years and 271 ODIs, the Ireland-Scotland match in the Dubai Triangular Series was abandoned without a ball bowled.
• A world first took place in Europe in 2006 when a cricket match was played in two countries at the same time. The game, organised by the Fellowship of Fairly Odd Places Cricket Club, took place on a piece of land which had the international border between the Netherlands and Belgium running straight across the wicket (pictured).
• A former Australian cricketer ended up in hospital in 2015 when a kangaroo knocked her off her bike while cycling in surburban Canberra. Bronwyn Calver – who appeared in three Tests against England in 1988 – received eight stitches as a result of the collision: “While the roo did hop away it was subsequently hit by a car and killed. They don’t call Canberra the Bush Capital for nothing.”
• A South Australian fast bowler received a suspension from the game in 2013/14 after an incident at a suburban cricket ground in Melbourne. Daniel Worrall, who made his first-class debut in 2012/13, was punished after scratching an image of a penis and testicles into the pitch at the Toorak Park ground.
• While touring Pakistan in 1998/99, two Australian players were reprimanded after being photographed holding AK-47 assault rifles during a trip to the Khyber Pass. The decision by Justin Langer and Gavin Robertson to be photographed by Pakistan guards at a location near the border with Afghanistan was described by ACB official Denis Rogers as “… naïve and ill-considered and offensive to the wider Australian community.”
• David Hay, who appeared in four first-class matches for Oxford University, later became a career diplomat, rising to the position of Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1964. Hay, who had a highest score of 96 against Lancashire in 1938, was the grandson of William Moule, a judge, who played for Australia in their first Test in England, at The Oval in 1880.
• Kenya team-mates Steve Tikolo and Thomas Odoyo both appeared in 134 one-day internationals, starting and ending their careers in the same match. They both debuted in Kenya’s first ODI – against India in the 1996 World Cup at Cuttack – and left the game in the same match, a 2011 World Cup fixture against Zimbabwe at Kolkata.
• India’s Ghulam Ahmed appeared in 22 Tests over a period of exactly ten years, with his first and last played against the same opposition, at the same ground and at the same time of the year. Both his debut and final Tests came against the West Indies at Kolkata and were played between 31 December and 4 January in 1948/49 and 1958/59. The only other player to achieve such an unusual double is South African spinner Paul Harris – against India at Cape Town – between the second and sixth of January in 2006/07 and 2010/11.
An Australian cricket board game, dated 1913
• One of Australia’s top-selling board games was recognised by the country’s philatelic agency in 2009. A family favourite since the 1950s, the ‘Test Match’ cricket game was featured on a 55 cent stamp for Australia Post’s ‘Classic Toys’ series. Australia Post released another cricket stamp in the same year, part of a six-stamp series, ‘Let’s Get Active’.
• Kevin Pietersen went global in 2015 when he revealed a massive tattoo of a map of the world with red stars indicating where he scored centuries in international cricket. The body art (pictured) was done by acclaimed Melbourne tattooist Mick Squires: “If you can go and score as many centuries as he has and be able to put them on a world map then you’ve got something to say.”
• On the eve of the 2011/12 Border-Gavaskar Trophy an Australian university researcher declared than Sachin Tendulkar was statistically a better batsman than Don Bradman. Nicholas Rohde, from the University of Griffith, claimed that statistics proved Tendulkar is the greatest batsman of all time: “It’s an emotional issue and there will always be debate between followers of Test cricket about the relative career performances of various batsmen. But by using the principles of opportunity cost and supernormal profit, the ranking procedure is actually very simple.
“Essentially, each player is scored according to their career aggregate runs, minus the total number of runs that an average player of that era would accrue over the same number of innings. The rankings are designed to allow for meaningful comparisons of players with careers of different lengths.”
Dr Rohde’s research, based on figures up to 2010, was published in the December 2011 issue of Economic Papers, which had Bradman at No. 1. He said, though, that based on performances since its publication, Tendulkar had dethroned Bradman to assume the top ranking. Jacques Kallis slotted in at No. 3, followed by Rahul Dravid, Brian Lara, Garry Sobers, Allan Border, Sunil Gavaskar, Steve Waugh and Javed Miandad.
Don Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar in 1988
• Afghanistan’s Nasir Ahmadzai was dismissed in the most unusual of circumstances when he made his first-class debut in 2014. Batting in the second innings against Zimbabwe A in Harare, the non-striker Sharafuddin Ashraf let out a huge scream as the wicketkeeper attempted to take a catch off the bowling of Cuthbert Musoko. With the chance put down, the umpires decided to give Nasir out obstructing the field under law 37.
Nasir became only the third player to be dismissed in such fashion on his first-class debut, after Dera Ismail Khan’s Qaiser Khan – in his only match – against Railways at Lahore in 1964/65 and Sukkur’s Arshad Ali against Quetta at the Racecourse Ground in 1983/84.
• After 338 matches and 125 years of Test cricket, South Africa introduced their first black batsman in 2014/15. Temba Bavuma made his Test debut against the West Indies at Port Elizabeth, scoring ten in his only innings. He opened his account with a boundary off the first ball he faced, but failed to score a run off his next 25.
• Shane Warne ended his Test career in 2007 with a record 12 consecutive victories. Next on the list is England’s George Ulyett and the West Indies’ Eldine Baptiste, who both finished their Test-playing days with ten wins in a row. For Baptiste, it represented his entire career.
• An animal rights group named and shamed former Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath in 2015 by releasing photographs of him hunting wildlife in Africa. McGrath, who had previously indicated a love of hunting, was pictured beside the dead carcasses of a number of animals, including a buffalo and hyenas: “In 2008, I participated in a hunting safari in Zimbabwe that was licensed and legal, but in hindsight highly inappropriate. It was an extremely difficult time in my life and looking back I deeply regret being involved.”