They are Spartan...
The intrinsic rarity and deep oddness of very big scores was revealed once again in Multan.
Christopher Roger Woakes.
That is the full list of players from the squad touring Pakistan who were alive on 27 July 1990, when Graham Gooch made 333 against India at Lord’s, England’s last triple century. A wonderkid named Mike Atherton opened the batting, with David Gower coming in at number three. That pair, in Multan on the mic for Harry Brook’s moment, were the true links back to Goochie’s epic.
I once spent a day with Mick Hunt, who served as the Lord’s groundsman for 49 years, for a piece in Wisden Almanack. He remembered Gooch’s game well. The pitch he’d prepared was a belter but the first morning dawned with the sky full of cloud and a touch of humidity to the air.
Mohammad Azharuddin, India’s captain, came up to him.
“Bat first?” He asked.
“You know what it’s like here…” Mick replied. “If it’s overcast it does swing. Fresh pitch, first day, bit of seam…”
Azharuddin won the toss and bowled. England declared almost two days later on 653-4. At the close, Azhar walked past the groundsman again.
“He went, you c***,” Mick said. “That was one of my more memorable cock-ups...”
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Gooch became England’s batting coach where he preached his credo of ‘daddy hundreds’ to subsequent generations. And his Lord’s triple certainly ushered in a golden age of huge scores – just not by England players.
Of the 32 Test match triple centuries ever made, nineteen would come in the years 1990 – 2019. Garry Sobers’ highest score of 365, which had stood since 1958, was beaten three times in a decade, by Brian Lara in 1994, Matthew Hayden in 2003 and then Lara again a year later.
Virender Sehwag and Chris Gayle joined Lara with not one but two 300-plus scores – and Sehwag, that mad and still underrated genius, would also make 293 against Sri Lanka in 2009. Sri Lanka racked up two triples of their own from Sanath Jayasuriya and Kumar Sangakkara; Australia had four, via Hayden, Mark Taylor, Michael Clarke and David Warner. Inzamam, Younis Khan and Azhar Ali chipped in for Pakistan, while Hashim Amla and Baz McCullum got South Africa and New Zealand over the line for the first time in their respective histories. England’s best effort in all of those years was Alastair Cook’s paltry 294 at Birmingham in 2011, a match in which Sehwag bagged a pair.
Perhaps the most extraordinary was Karun Nair’s 303 against England at Chennai in 2016. Those runs represent 81 per cent of Nair’s career total of 374, made across six Test appearances. His other scores ran 4, 13, 26, 0, 23 and 5 – and that nought was the only time he ever batted in the second innings of a Test match. Nair will surely forever remain the only triple centurion not to have registered a single Test run in a second dig.
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Despite Harry Brook, the golden age of the triple hundred seems to be fading. His is the first since David Warner in November 2019, which in turn was the first since a glut in 2016. I would guess that is due to the overall acceleration of the game and the increase in shorter Tests that yield conclusive results. The common factor in almost all of the huge scores of the post-1990 period is the speed at which they have been made. Of the late-era triples, Warner’s came at a strike rate of 80, Karun Nair’s at 79, Brook’s at 98. Only the great Sehwag was quicker than that, his 319 against South Africa scored at 104 (and his 293 against Sri Lanka at a dizzying 115).
It is self-evident that you need to score rapidly to get that many runs, and the combination of circumstances needed to go really big may become ever more rare. Yet if I had to pick a player to get the next one Harry Brook would be near the top of the list, because of his strike rate and also the knowledge that he can now do it. Given the mental and physical state of the Pakistan bowlers and the flatness of the Multan wicket, maybe Brooky will go back-to-back.
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Until Harry bunted Saim Ayub down the ground to land the big fish, the Test had been about Joe Root becoming - as you may have heard - England’s greatest ever run scorer. Lovers of the Da Vinci Code can find hidden meaning in the list of players to have been England’s highest scorer in Tests. Since the record passed from Colin Cowdrey to Geoffrey Boycott, it has gone to David Gower, Graham Gooch, Alastair Cook and now Joe Root. Students of such things will note the presence of two ‘o’s in Boycott’s surname, then a glitch in the matrix with Gower utilising just the one, before that run of Gooch, Cook and Root made the code plain for all to see. This surely means that Harry Brook will succeed Root… except, as Mike Atherton wrote in the Times, perhaps no-one ever will given the changing nature of the game.
Boycott was the last England player to hold the overall record of most Test match runs. He took the title from Garry Sobers when he hit Dilip Doshi for four during what turned out to be his penultimate Test at Delhi in 1981. “I was thrilled to bits,” he wrote, “but in my interview with the media at the end of the day I was very clear that it didn’t make me a better batsman than Garry Sobers…”
It's an interesting thought. Root is batting in some kind of zen state at the moment, with 18 centuries in his last 50 Test matches. Tendulkar is still miles ahead and perhaps the summit looks nearer than it really is, but should he get there, would Root see himself as greater than Sachin?
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Make 300 and the rewards will come. Harry Brook walked away from the presentations in Multan as the Super Saaf Striker of the Match, the Master Blaster of the Match from VGO Tel No26 mobile phone, the Bank Alfalah Outstanding Performance, and the Kingdom Valley Player of the Match, a feat that will surely never be repeated.