Monday, August 04, 2008

Kevin help us all

A brief cricket round-up following this week's excitement:
  • Michael Vaughan's departure following South Africa's thrilling victory at Edgbaston was pretty much inevitable - as Jonathan Agnew rightly points out it was his own personal lack of runs rather than problems with his captaincy per se that did for him in the end. I'd have been inclined to give the job to Andrew Strauss, as he led England pretty well to victory over Pakistan in 2006 and should have been captain for the Ashes series that followed. But I can see why they've given Kevin Pietersen the job - they'd stated a preference for having the same captain for both Test and one-day sides, and he's the only guy who is a dead cert for both teams.
  • Mark Ramprakash finally made his hundredth hundred with an innings of 112 not out at the fag-end of a drawn game between Surrey and Yorkshire; his total of 676 innings to reach the figure slots him in at eighth-fastest on the list of 25. Incidentally the Cricinfo article listing Ramprakash's predecessors waxes somewhat hyperbolic about Geoff Boycott making his 100th 100 in his 100th Test match - actually it was his 65th Test match (his 100th being at Lord's against Australia in 1981 - one of the first Tests I remember watching on television).
  • Virender Sehwag produced another of his trademark innings with 201 not out for India against Sri Lanka in Galle - I haven't been able to confirm it conclusively, but I'm pretty sure that the Indian first innings total of 329 is the lowest completed Test innings to include a double-century; I think the previous record-holder was Graeme Pollock's 209 out of a total of 353 for South Africa against Australia in 1967. Sehwag also extended his record of successive 150+ scores to eleven.

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