First 125 years: two gladiators, 22 yards, five days

Let us now move on to the tables.

The featured table lists all situations where the bowler bowled more than 160 balls at a specific batsman. The downloadable table lists all instances with 120 balls as cut-off.

Hutton's 364 was a monumental innings. Wally Hammond was determined to grind Don Bradman and his team into the dust and batted for nearly three days. Hutton faced 847 balls - no extrapolation needed for this, and scored 364 runs. Bill O'Reilly and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith had contrasting spells. They had spells of 85-26-178-3 and 87-11-298-1 respectively. This wide disparity in runs conceded is reflected in the numbers. Hutton faced 215 balls against Fleetwood-Smith as against 203 against O'Reilly. However he scored many more runs off Fleetwood-Smith. This shows the advantage of separate extraction processes for balls and runs. This is the only instance of a batsman facing over 200 balls off two bowlers in an innings.

Derek Randall's presence in third position is a way-out situation since he scored only 150 runs. Coming in after a rare first-ball dismissal of Geoff Boycott, Randall batted for nearly ten hours and faced a whopping 498 balls. This, coupled with the fact that Jim Higgs bowled nearly 40% of the team overs, contributed to this unlikely combination, reaching to 199 balls.

An interesting presence in this table is that of Sanath Jayasuriya and Roshan Mahanama. In that mind-numbing "Test of patience" in 1997, Sri Lanka's mammoth 952 required 271 overs to be bowled. Rajesh Chauhan bowled most, with 78 overs, and Anil Kumble and Nilesh Kulkarni followed with 72 and 70 respectively. Chauhan features here twice, and the other two hapless bowlers feature in the longer list. Jayasuriya faced 166 balls off Chauhan and Mahanama, 161. These two faced 154, 149 balls off Kumble and 149 and 145 balls off Kulkarni. Ah! My hands get tired typing out these numbers. Paralysis of the mind could very well set in.

The featured table covers Test confrontations of 200 balls and above.

Hammond scored 119 and 177 and played a total of 977 balls. A monumental effort indeed. Clarrie Grimmett bowled over 100 overs and Hammond played 265 balls of these. This was during Bradman's debut series.

Andy Sandham scored 375 runs in the nine-day Test in which there was no play on the last two days (yes, you read it right). It is amazing that the score stood at England: 849, West Indies: 286, and England batted again. Then they did not send the first-innings triple-centurion until the score was 176 for 5. Otherwise, Sandham might very well have upstaged Graham Gooch. Sandham faced 219 balls from Tommy Scott but more importantly scored 129 runs, the highest in all these matches.

Marcus Trescothick vs Muttiah Muralitharan just missed getting into the group of Tests with ball-by-ball data. It is noteworthy that Trescothick faced Muralitharan away for over 200 balls without giving his wicket once to Murali.

This table also features confrontations clocking at 200 balls and above.

First, let us not forget that this is a double extrapolation method. Peter May's 891 itself is a derived figure. This was a match in which May and Colin Cowdrey engineered one of the greatest comebacks in history. After two innings the scores stood at England: 186. West Indies: 474. Then England were tottering at 113 for 3. The amateur duo of May and Cowdrey came in and added 411 runs. Sonny Ramadhin bowled 98 overs in the innings which is a record even today. May faced 308 balls off Ramadhin, and that was some feat. It is the highest faced by a batsman off a bowler. Even allowing for a 10% variation, this is around 270 balls. Let us not forget that May, the captain, declared when he was 285, thus depriving himself of a triple-century. In the bargain West Indies scored 72 for 7 and narrowly escaped a defeat. Shades of New Zealand against India during 1965.

Ken Barrington's marathon effort of 256 runs translated to 757 balls and 246 balls off Tom Veivers. Not many runs were scored, though. Garry Sobers, in his record-breaking innings of 365, which transposed to only 587 balls, faced 241 balls off Fazal Mahmood. Hanif faced maximum balls from Denis Atkinson during his 16 hour epic of 337. This was extrapolated to 1034 balls, the only time in history of Test cricket that a batsman faced over 1000 or more balls in an innings, extrapolated or otherwise. There is a fair chance that this would be correct since Hanif was an eminently defensive batsman.

The cut-off for this is also 200 balls.

May's figures were derived separately for each innings and added. Since he played a reasonable number of balls in the first innings, the total comes to 891 and May faced a mind-boggling tally of 340 balls off Ramadhin. This is by far the maximum number of balls faced by a batsman off a single bowler. Look at how far off this is from the Cyril Washbrook v Alf Valentine and Washbrook v Ramadhin numbers.

I am happy to see the presence of Allan Watkins' defensive classic during England's tour of India, with a virtual "B" side. Hutton, May, Cowdrey, Fred Trueman, Denis Compton, Trevor Bailey and Alec Bedser were missing. Watkins handled Vinoo Mankad very effectively. This is nostalgia for me since the first cricket book I ever read was the one on this tour.

Comparison of extrapolated values with actual values for selected combinations
Single innings
Test Year Batsman          Bowler          Ext Actual Diff (Act to Est)
1810 2006 DPMD Jayawardene N Boje          201  221  - 9.1%
1563 2001 JH Kallis        RW Price        188  189  -0.05%
2034 2012 Azhar Ali        MS Panesar      164  163  +0.07%
1641 2003 SP Fleming       M Muralitharan  160  185  -13.6%
1696 2004 BC Lara          GJ Batty        150  161  - 6.9%
Single Test
Test Year Batsman          Bowler          Ext Actual Diff
1641 2003 SP Fleming       M Muralitharan  249  265  - 6.1%
1572 2001 BC Lara          M Muralitharan  213  240  -11.3%
1952 2010 HM Amla          Harbhajan Singh 188  177  + 6.2%
1743 2005 Younis Khan      A Kumble        185  208  -11.1%
1562 2001 A Flower         CW Henderson    176  202  -12.9%

In this table I have compared the actual head-to-head values as determined in my previous analysis with values extrapolated using the single extrapolation method. The differences are of the order of 15% on either side. In general, the actual values tend to be higher than the extrapolated values.

Finally, a question might arise as to what degree of confidence I have on the extrapolated results. I would say around 80% for the single extrapolation and 70% for the double extrapolation method. In other words I would expect values to be around 10% either side for single extrapolation and 15% on either side for the double extrapolation. Just a gut feeling. That is all. I agree that this is an estimate. However, when we have figures like May scoring 285 runs out of a total of 547 in 258 overs, we are not going to be far off if we say, with 70% degree of confidence, that May would have faced 811 balls (1548*285/547).

Readers are requested to come up with suggestions on how the ball-by-ball data available for the recent 550 matches can be used. I have one idea, provided by Ashwin Krishnamurthy, which is to look at how players played during the period close to reaching landmarks, such as hundreds.

I have created a document file containing all the qualifying performances. There are about 380 Innings-level selections and 270 Test-level combinations, shown in four tables. To download/view this document, please CLICK HERE.

I will not comment on the South African tour happenings since ESPNcricinfo does not like outsiders using strong comments on these matters in their space, and my choice of words cannot be mild.

However, I cannot but pass a comment or two on the Indian bowling woes attributed to the new rules. The sardonic smile you see on the horizon is mine on hearing that the new rules are not helping MS Dhoni. How do the same rules that help the India team plunder 120 runs in the last ten overs become unfair when it comes to the India bowlers? Without the new rules, India might well have finished at 270, in Mohali. And how do the new rules bring down R Ashwin's skills, someone who has opened the bowling in all formats of the game regularly, and who is not a guileful Erapalli Prasanna, by a long mile. And Ravindra Jadeja's flat fastish slow left arm is not going to be affected a lot by a fresher ball. The plain truth is that, barring Mitchell Johnson (and Mohammad Shami at Ranchi), the bowling across the board has been awful. And that is the difference in the series scoreline.