It was clear that deciding the Man of the Match for this Test would be somewhat difficult. Finally the Crown Prince won at the expense of the Knight. We look at their records in this Test.
Highest innings by Asian batsmen against England (200 and more):
KK Nair’s 303* is the highest by any Asian batsman against England, surpassing the 274 by Zaheer Abbas in 1971. That remains the record for the highest by an Asian batsman in England. For India, the record is 221 by Gavaskar in 1979.
Nair’s 303* is also the highest for India vs England, surpassing the 235 by Virat Kohli earlier in this series and the 224 by VG Kambli in 1992-93.
Nair also became the third to make a triple century as his maiden century.
These are the highest maiden centuries (250 and above):
A dynamic link for all such scores of 200 and above:
http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/records/230132.html
More detailed accounts of the innings of Sobers and Simpson can be seen here:
https://abn397.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/make-mine-a-double-no-a-triple/
https://abn397.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/make-mine-a-double-no-a-triple-part-2/
We now move on to Ravindra Jadeja’s all-round feat.
Here we have a complete list of those who scored a fifty and took 10 wickets in a Test:
This has been achieved on 26 occasions by 24 players. Jadeja is the only one to take 3 or more catches as well. The only other Indian to have scored a fifty and taken 10 wickets in a match is Kapil Dev. Only Botham, Imran and Shakib have scored a century and taken 10 wickets in a match. Earlier Davidson scored over 100 runs and took 10 wickets, but did not score a century.
The other main all-round feat is a century and five wickets in an innings, which is slightly more common. It has been achieved on 32 occasions by 25 players, including Mankad, Umrigar and Ashwin (twice).
On only three occasions have these players taken 3 catches as well: Mushtaq (1973), Botham (Feb 1978) and Kallis (2002).
Now for a few other contrived all-round records. Jadeja took 10 wickets in the match and 4 catches (of which one was a c & b). He is one of only 5 to achieve this:
10 wickets and 4 catches in a match:
And he is also part of a small group of 15 players who had an innings tally of 10 or more wickets and catches put together. 5 players have 11.
They are GA Lohmann, JM Noreiga, HJ Tayfield, AE Trott and LC Braund. 10 others including Jadeja have 10.
In Jadeja’s case, the one c & b meant he had a hand in 9 of the 10 wickets which fell. Only Dawson (b Mishra) evaded him.
Tail piece: While Karun Nair is nominally from Kerala, he was born in Jodhpur and has lived mainly in Bangalore.
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