Posted by This Multan pitch is flatter than a pancake that’s gone under a Looney Tunes steamroller. That doesn’t mean you can score infinite runs on it though. Even Harry Brook had to settle for a mere 317 – and he’s so far made a hundred in every Test he’s played in Pakistan.
Liam Neeson’s Taken character famously has “a very particular set of skills”. Because he’s not a cricketer or a businessman, he apparently doesn’t know about the word ‘skillset’.
“But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career; skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
While Harry Brook’s Test career has so far been relatively short, he has nevertheless acquired the very particular set of skills required to score very large numbers of runs on flat pitches. This makes him a nightmare for Pakistan bowlers.
The long haul
There’s a tendency in some quarters to undervalue big innings played on true pitches. Sure, the value of a run isn’t fixed and ‘tough runs’ scored in challenging conditions can be more significant when it comes to shaping the outcome of a game – but big innings are still big feats.
Not everyone can do this. Test triple hundreds in any conditions require certain qualities that most batters simply do not have. There’s a reason why Brook’s was only the second by an England batter in our lifetime after Graham Gooch’s 333.
Here’s Joe Root yesterday.
Look at those hollowed-out eyes. He looks tired, doesn’t he?
Root was ‘only’ on 100 at this moment. He was in fact being momentarily buoyed by the elation of having just reached three figures. And that’s what he looked like: knackered.
Root made another 160 after this. Big innings are hard physical work. Harry Brook had to run a great many of Root’s runs as well as his own, because his partner wasn’t getting ’em in boundaries – just 68 out of his final tally of 262, in fact.
Brook and Root covered an awful lot of ground. You won’t see what was exceptional about these innings in the highlights.
Alastair Cook was an endurance batter. Cook worked to develop extraordinary stamina, not so he could ascend to some unimaginable new plane of batting, but so that he could remain on the one he was on for a little bit longer. All that physical work was geared towards a simple goal. Cook wanted his feet to move much the same at 6pm as they did at midday.
Root is another who has this physical capacity – but it’s psychological too. Conscious thought is utterly draining. The ability to glide along, making runs on autopilot is rare and invaluable in these sorts of situations. One way or another, most people burn out not long after reaching three figures.
Cook made five Test double hundreds. Root has just gone past him with this sixth, but it tails off pretty quickly from there when you’re looking at England batters. Len Hutton made four. Kevin Pietersen made three. Gooch, David Gower and Jonathan Trott are among half a dozen who made two. Wally Hammond is in the top spot with seven.
Bully for you
Here’s another film quote for you: “Greed is good.”
You may view them as ‘cheaper’ runs overall, but there are undeniably times when a team’s flat track bullying proficiency is what makes the difference between winning and losing a match.
In large part because their home pitches tend to be more lively and the ball they use there more responsive, England have historically been pretty shit at this kind of thing.
You’d think batting would become easier on an absolute road, but that’s not really the story over the span of a long innings. Yeah, it’s easier for a bit, but then pretty soon England batters find themselves in uncharted physical and psychological territory and their innings comes to an end.
Few England batters have had a broader set of skills than Graham Thorpe. He made one double hundred and his next best effort was 138. You don’t even really need to go beyond the Bs to demonstrate this: Botham, Boycott and Bell all made only one double hundred.
Brook, you’d hazard, has another in him. And that is impressive – not least because the very particular set of skills required for a flat track triple aren’t the only ones he has. Lord knows he’s good for a rushed fifty ‘before you get a ball with your name on it’ too.
This is why the Test triple club is small. It’s not for everyone. Brian Lara made one, and a quadruple – not to mention a 501* in first-class cricket. Nine of Lara’s 33 Test hundreds were doubles or more.
Sachin Tendulkar, in contrast, never made it past 248. We’re stretching ‘only’ a fair bit here, but only six of his 51 Test centuries were doubles.
Harry Brook has one triple. And that’s a lot. We reckon Chris Woakes was on for one too, if Ollie Pope hadn’t cruelly sawn him off on 17 with the declaration.
If you like your cricket writing a little more freewheeling and – let’s be honest – a little less focused, please help support King Cricket by backing our Patreon campaign. Ever since we switched off all the ads, we’ve been entirely reliant on our readers for funding.
If you want to get a better feel for where the money goes, you can find our other features here. And if you want to find out more about the ins and outs of the Patreon campaign, you can find more details here.
Or, if you’re really new to these parts, why not sign up for the email first to get a feel for what this site’s about.
There is a remake of Taken, written by and starring Matthew Hayden. The corresponding line is:
Immediately after putting the phone down, the kidnappers release his daughter and give themselves up to the police.
More horror than thriller, that one.
Have you ever seen that other one with him in, A Deliverable Negative Dreamspace Experience on Elm Street?
We’ve just switched our computer off. Can someone do an AI image of Freddy Krueger in an MCC blazer instead of his stripey jumper to round out our joke.
Cheers.
MCC colours aside, Freddy Krueger is surely ideally suited to be the guest pitch reporter for the second test at Multan.
“It’s, like, one of those recurring nightmares. OMG, this pitch is behaving just like the dead dodo thing two tracks away. How could this possibly be happening again? Who knew?”
Please install a lol reaction button for this kind of content. Bang on the money. By which I mean you’ve executed the goalstate deliverable with aplomb, and could you initiate an emotion-based content reaction functionality etc etc
Ps. One of those “Joe Root also made 262” days.
Who told them to change the rules? Both teams scoring huge in the first innings means a draw. Pakistan have decided to try losing by an innings instead.
There is a problem here. Everybody knows that it is impossible to lose after scoring 500. Totally impossible, it has NEVER HAPPENED. Some people think it has happened, but these people are wrong.
This means that in fact, we NEED Pakistan to bat out the draw tomorrow. I didn’t realise it earlier, but we really need this. This will prove that it is in fact impossible to lose after scoring 500, and we can all get on with our lives as before. Otherwise… no, I don’t want to think about it.
This has not ended well for you, has it.
I wouldn’t’ve got up to listen to or watch the denouement; Adelaide in instead.
The fabulous read, “Hitting against the Spin. How Cricket Really Works” clearly proves that batting second on flat pitches is the best option.
Amazing what a 450 partnership at 5.2 an over will do to the conventional wisdom, eh?
I can’t spake. Daisy can’t spake.
Shove it up your Brydon.
England is the best cricket team (especially in the matter of winning test matches by an innings after conceding 500+ in the first innings) in the entire world, ever.
Multan has previous in this regard. They seem to always have a flat track which means scoring 200-odd more in the first innings is likely to be a win. Even then 823 is ludicrous.
Well not always. It was 281 played 202 when these two teams met there less than two years ago. But quite often, yeah.
So, how many records were broken during this test match?
Perhaps a record-breaking number of records were broken?
Maybe more record-breaking records were broken by record breakers than if the McWhirter twins and Roy Castle spent five days smashing more 45rpm singles into pieces than anyone had ever done before?
A comparative sentence designed for people of a certain age, APW. Thanks.
Back when Record Breakers was a relatively new thing, I identified as a record breaker myself, as my December 1974 diary attests:
https://ianlouisharris.com/1974/12/30/breaking-the-world-record-for-coin-catching-with-paul-deacon-woodfield-avenue-30-december-1974/
Thanks again, APW for bringing that glorious moment back to my mind. It puts my brace of actual Guinness World records into the shade.
I fear that the Test which will forever hold the record for most records broken is the First Test Ever Played. But does a record truly count as “broken” if it has simply been set for the very first time? Things get worse if we consider Test matches as a form of first-class cricket and therefore allow “records broken” in a match to include first-class records. But statistical data for early first-class matches are severely lacking, and it’s not even clear at which point the tradition of “great matches” (which were taking place as early as the 17th century) actually morphed into “first-class matches” as we would now understand the term. This renders the whole business “first-class records” rather fraught. Cricket statisticians are surprisingly unanimous about when real “Test” cricket began – the1876/77 tour of Australia is the accepted convention and the two matches played by Combined Australia XI vs James Lillywhite’s XI at the MCG in March and April 1877 are now accepted as the first Tests – yet the designation of early “Test” matches was only bestowed long after the event. Lillywhite’s team was fairly weak, and an attempt at a parallel Australia tour by a Fred Grace’s XI fell through – had there been two reasonably “representative” English teams touring simultaneously, would future historians have been so sure which one retrospectively counted as “England”? And some rogue statisticians or cricket historians may put forward different proposals for what counts as “Test”.
Indeed some stick-in-the-muds discount the ICC XI, while the England vs Rest of the World tour of 1970 – a hasty replacement for the cancelled South African tour – was originally counted as “Test” status, got Garfield Sobers on the Lord’s honours board for his 6/41 in the First “Test”, was demoted to non-Test status by the ICC in 1972, yet still counted as five “Tests” by Wisden’s statisticians until 1980. Even thinking about England-Pakistan games, the infamously forfeited 4th Test at The Oval in 2006 was never stripped of its Test status but its result was retrospectively nullified to a draw by the ICC in July 2008 before being reinstated in February 2009. So it seems we may not be sure whether a match was really a Test even some years afterwards, while the result declared at the time isn’t guaranteed not to change in future.
As for batting, bowling and fielding records, early scorecards often lack full details about dismissals or balls faced, while published batting and bowling figures don’t always add up to agree with each other. Some statisticians scour old ball-by-ball paperwork to see if they can find “missing runs”, particularly ones scorers attributed to the wrong batter during phases of play where the batters were regularly changing ends and the scorers were being hurried. Seeking “Bradman’s missing runs” is a pastime beloved of patriotic Australian statisticians. This shadowy past is one reason many records are “since”: since WW1, since WW2, since full ball-by-ball data became available. For speed or degrees of swing or pace, since full ball-tracking data became available. So this brings us round full circle: despite the congested international calendar, there are many days where only one Test is in-play, as was the case in this match. Does this Test break all records since the previous Test, or is it simply “setting” all records since the previous Test?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Test_cricket_from_1877_to_1883
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rest_of_the_World_cricket_team_in_England_in_1970
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_cricket_team_in_England_in_2006
Hello friends, here is some writing for The Cricketer. It’s behind a paywall, obviously, because capitalism. But you get the idea.
https://www.thecricketer.com/Topics/premiumfeatures/brian_lara,_rocky_flintoff_and_peep_show_life_through_the_eyes_of_a_warwickshire_fan.html?t=638643211372770915