Test Records - Week Ending 18th June 2006

Test #1806 India in West Indies 2006 (2ndTest) at Beausejour Stadium, Gros Islet, St Lucia

For second time in a row, India failed to wrest the initiative they had for bowling out the West Indies on the final day for a victory as the carribeans escaped from losing the test match again with another drawn encounter. If it were their tailenders in the 1st test who saved the match, this time their skipper Brian Lara with a majestic and responsible innings of 120 from 307 balls and a match saving partnership of 129 with Chanderpaul enabled West Indies to save the test after they were reeling at 51 for 3.

India started the proceedings with a 350+ score on the opening day of the test match when they ended the day with an healthy score of 361/4 ( check my earlier posting on this statistic).Sewhag almost became the 5th batsman in test history to have scored century before lunch and fell just one run short. Only four batsmen Bradman, McCartney, Trumper and Majid Khan achieved this distinction till now and is one of the most coveted record any opening batsman , especially an aggressive bat like Sewhag would like to have. Mohammed Kaif at last registered a test hundred.

Here are some of the test records that took place in this test , which happens to be only third ever test match played at this venue and not surprisingly all of them ended in draws on this batting paradise.

Pedro Collins, during his 1st innings haul of 4/116 became the 17th West Indian and 138th player to capture 100 or more wickets in a test career. He took 30 tests to complete this milestone. At the end of this test match his bowling figures read as



During India’s innings 3 batsmen Virendra Sewhag, Rahul Dravid and Mohammed Kaif have all hit centuries and took their scores into 140s. This provides only 4th such instance in 130 years history of test cricket of 3 players of one side scoring 140 or more runs in the same innings .

Captains of both the teams in this test have scored a century providing only 34th such instance. Following is the list of all such instances

On the 3rd day of the test match Chris Gayle’s was the first wicket to fall for 46 caught behind by Dhoni of the bowling of Kumble. When West Indies was asked to follow on , he was the last batsman out for the day, again caught by Dhoni of Pahtan for 2 thus providing a rare occurence of same player getting out both first and last on the same day of a test match.

Same batsman getting out twice on the same day did happen several times, in fact 454 times including Chirs Gayle’s instance, but same batsman becoming both the first and last wicket to fall in a day’s play is very rare in test cricket as shown in the list below. Same bowler took the wicket of the same batsman thrice ( Imtiaz Ahmed by Roy Gilchrist, Devon Malcom by Merv Hughes and Alec Stewart by Geoff Allot), but getting out caught by the same player either fielder or wicket keeper never happened before till Mahendra Singh Dhoni caught Chris Gayle both times off the bowling of Anil Kumble in the 1st innings and Irfan Pathan in the 2nd.

Finally a trivia fact : Virendra Sewhag's score of 180 is his seventh score of 150 or more in a row when he hit a century. His last seven century scores were 309, 173, 155, 164, 201, 254 & 180.