adminRAWALPINDI. – The Rawalpindi Test defied precedent, expectation, and the accepted bounds of cricketing science.
On a featureless travesty of a cricket pitch that categorically refused to deteriorate – and was estimated by experts to have a half-life not far short of weapons-grade plutonium – in a match shorn of around 10 overs per day by the sun sticking to its scheduled setting time, England concorted one of the most astonishing Test match victories.
Even allowing for the weakness of Pakistan’s bowling attack – they had not fielded an XI with fewer collective career Test wickets since the mid-1950s, when they were a new addition to international cricket – this match should have been a draw.
Almost the only feasible path to victory on such a surface, in what was essentially a four-and-a-half day game, was to score something in the region of 921 runs in 136.5 overs, to allow sufficient time to take 20 wickets.
England stuck to that blueprint with impressive precision, right from the start.
In the Test Match Special commentary box, my stats machine was overheating from the first over to the last.
The gripping, fluctuating and unprecedented story of the game Vesuviused out a pyroclastic flow of extraordinary numbers, from the moment Zak Crawley equalled Chris Gayle’s record 14 runs in the first over of a Test match.
Ben Duckett and Crawley reached 100 without loss in 13.4 overs, the second-fastest hundred first-wicket stand in Tests, and the fastest in the opening innings of a Test, and the third time England have broken their national record for fastest 100 opening partnership in the last five games.
The 14.5 overs it took England to reach 100 in the second innings was also in the Top 10 Fastest 0-to-100s in Test history.
England reached 200 in 30.1 and 30.3 overs in their two innings, the third and fourth fastest a team has posted 200 in Tests (and breaking the record for the opening innings of a Test by 26 balls).
They passed 300 in 49.2 overs, the second fewest overs required to reach that total – beaten only by South Africa against a very weak Zimbabwe in March 2005, and the fewest in the opening innings of a Test.
They set new records for fewest overs required to reach 400 (in 64.0 overs, by a margin of 4.1 overs), 500 (in 74.4, breaking that record by 15.3 overs), and 600, in 90.2 overs, sledgehammering a barely comprehensible 33.2 overs, or 200 balls, or well over two hours of cricket, off the previous record of 123.4 overs.
The pitiless pudding of a pitch may have been the ideal surface on which to bat like the England of the Ben Stokes-Brendon McCullum era – minimal lateral movement, predictable bounce and an unresponsive ball. Nonetheless, the assault was unprecedented.
They scored at 6.73 runs per over in their two innings combined, smithereening their own record for fastest run rate by a team batting in both innings of a Test – 5.40, set at Trent Bridge last summer, which itself broke a record which had stood since October 1902, when a legendary Australian team, on the way home from a victorious Ashes tour, hammered South Africa around Johannesburg. – BBC Sport.
Online Reporter