Masakadza sets a new record

Travis Basevi and George Binoy21-Oct-2009

While most of the cricket community was taking a break from the demanding international schedule following the Champions Trophy in South Africa - and a smaller part of it is trying to keep pace with the Champions League in India - Zimbabwe and Kenya were playing a five-ODI series in Harare. Largely unnoticed, Zimbabwe won the rubber 4-1, but Hamilton Masakadza's contribution to the victory was spotted by a reader, Bhagyesh Shah, who wrote to tell us the Zimbabwe batsman's aggregate of 467 runs was the highest for a bilateral series of any length.

Masakadza began with 156 in the first game, scored 66, 44 and 23 in the next three, before ending the series with a career-best 178 not out. His 467 runs came at an average of 116.75 and he beat Chris Gayle's bilateral-series record of 455. Gayle set the benchmark in India during a seven-match series in 2002-03, played on some of the flattest tracks in recent memory. Out of the 14 team totals in the series, four were more than 300, and six others exceeded 270. Gayle scored three hundreds and a half-century, averaging 65, as West Indies won 4-3.

Most of the top bilateral-series aggregates have been scored in contests comprising five ODIs or more. The first entry for a shorter series (four matches or less) is Zaheer Abbas' 346 runs, in a four-ODI home series against India in 1982-83. He started poorly, with 10 in the first match, but ended it with a hat-trick of hundreds. However, Mohammad Yousuf - when he was known as Yousuf Youhana - scored 405 runs in four innings during a series in Zimbabwe in 2002-03. It was a five-ODI series, which Pakistan swept, but Yousuf didn't bat in the fourth game. He was dismissed only once and so his average for the series was 405 as well.

The highest aggregate in a three-ODI series is Graham Gooch's 289 against Australia in 1985. He scored 57, 115 and 117 - was England's Player of the Series - but they lost the 2-1.

If we expand our net to include multi-team one-day tournaments, the highest aggregate belongs to Greg Chappell, who scored 686 runs in the 1980-81 World Series Cup, a tournament infamous for the under-arm ball incident during the third of the best-of-four finals. Chappell scored a century in the second game of the tournament, only two fifties in the next nine, and made three half-centuries in the last three finals to lead Australia to a 3-1 win.

The closest anyone's come to beating Chappell is Sachin Tendulkar, who scored 673 runs in 11 innings during the 2003 World Cup in South Africa. Matthew Hayden challenged Tendulkar's World Cup record in the 2007 tournament but was dismissed for 38 in the final, 14 runs short of Tendulkar's tally.

The record for most wickets in a bilateral series doesn't belong to Wasim Akram, Glenn McGrath or even Muttiah Muralitharan. The mark of 17 wickets set by Patrick Patterson against India in 1987-88, and equalled by Craig Mathews against Australia in 1993-94, was finally broken by Javagal Srinath in New Zealand in 2002-03, during a nightmare series for batsmen. Srinath kicked off the ODI series in style, taking 4 for 23 in Auckland. He picked up three more three-wicket hauls in the remaining six games to finish the series with 18 scalps at 11.16 apiece at an economy-rate of 3.03 per over. New Zealand medium-pacer Andre Adams played only four matches in that series but took 14 wickets at 9.35 each, the most for a bowler in a four-ODI series.

Surprisingly, most of the bowlers in the table below aren't legendary one-day bowlers. There are some obscure names like Paul Jarvis, the England fast-bowler, who took 15 of his 24 ODI wickets during a six-match series against India in 1992-93. Sourav Ganguly, a part-time operator, also features, for his 15 wickets against Pakistan on the seamer-friendly pitches in Toronto in 1997.

The list of players with most wickets in multi-team ODI tournaments, however, is full of great one-day bowlers. McGrath is at first and second place, for his 27 wickets in 11 Carlton & United games against England and Sri Lanka in 1998-99, and for his 26 scalps at the 2007 World Cup, his final international assignment, for which he was Player of the Series.

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