What is the highest identical score made by the first three batters in a Test innings?
And what is the record for the most overs bowled by a player on debut in his first Test innings?
The trio of 14s by Shadman Islam, Saif Hassan and Nazmul Hossain against Pakistan in Chattogram last week was the highest such coincidence of scores in a Test. In the 1985 Ashes at Edgbaston, Andrew Hilditch, Graeme Wood and Kepler Wessels were all out for 10 in Australia's second innings.
Tom Latham was stumped in Kanpur by Srikar Bharat, after Wriddhiman Saha went off with a stiff neck. Latham is the third man to suffer this unusual fate in a Test. The first was the South African Sibley "Tip" Snooke, in the second Test against England in Durban in 1909-10. He was stumped by Neville Tufnell, who was deputising for Herbert Strudwick, who had been hit in the face: "I had a blow just over the eye," Strudwick wrote. "A ball from [George] Thompson pitched on the leg stump and got straight up!" Tufnell hadn't played a Test at the time, but he did make his debut in the final match of the tour, in Cape Town, keeping wicket even though Strudwick also played.
Ian Botham leads the way for England in Tests against Australia with 148 wickets, although strictly speaking only 128 of those came in Ashes matches (he played four against Australia in which the urn was not at stake, in 1979-80 and 1980). The lower figure is more likely to fall in the coming series to Stuart Broad, who currently has 118 wickets against Australia in Tests; Jimmy Anderson has 104.
Before the current series got underway, New Zealand had played 34 Test matches in India. Of those, they had lost 16 (including the last six) and also drawn 16. That leaves the two matches New Zealand have won: by 167 runs in Nagpur in 1969-70 (only their third Test victory away from home, after two in South Africa in 1961-62), and by 136 runs in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1988-89, with Richard Hadlee taking ten wickets.
The Sri Lanka offspinner Suraj Randiv toiled through 73 overs in the first innings of his debut Test, against India in Colombo in July 2010. He finished with 2 for 222, which is the most runs conceded by a bowler in an innings on debut (next comes Australia's Jason Krejza, with 8 for 215 against India in Nagpur in 2008-09), but one debutant did send down more overs. In his first Test, in the Ashes at Old Trafford in 1964, the England seamer Tom Cartwright delivered no fewer than 77 overs, including 43 on the first day alone. He finished with 2 for 118, and 32 maidens, many of them bowled to Australia's captain Bob Simpson, who made 311 in nearly 11 hours. Cartwright told his biographer Stephen Chalke: "I was going for under two an over, so I never felt under any pressure. In fact, I rather enjoyed it... It was just a long grind."
Steven Lynch is the editor of the updated edition of Wisden on the Ashes