When being too old, or young, didn't matter

Two 37-year olds, Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist, scored the most runs in the second season of the IPL. A 38-year-old, Anil Kumble, took 21 wickets, two fewer than the highest wicket-taker. And they say Twenty20 is a young man's game. The oldest player in the league was Sanath Jayasuriya, 39, but he did not have a successful tournament. The performances of the others, however, prompted us to check how many times the oldest player involved in series finished as the highest run-scorer or wicket-taker. While we were at it, we looked at instances of the youngest players in a series scoring the most runs and taking the highest number of wickets. We've only looked at Tests in this column, and saved the ODIs for next week.

Jack Hobbs was 45 when West Indies toured England in 1928, and he was the highest run-scorer of the series with 212 runs, though he played only two innings. Hobbs missed the first Test because of a strain but returned to score 53 and 159 in innings victories at Old Trafford and The Oval. Ernest Tyldesley, the second highest run-scorer of the series, made only 198, despite playing three innings.

Don Bradman played only one series against India, in 1947-48, at the age of 39, and he was good enough to top the batting charts comfortably. It was Bradman's penultimate series and he managed to score 715 runs in six innings at an average of 178.75. The second highest aggregate of the series was Vijay Hazare's 429 in 10 innings.

Alec Stewart is the only batsman to be the highest scorer twice in series in which he's been the oldest player. The first was the home series against Pakistan in 1996. Stewart was 33 - eight days older than Saleem Malik - and he scored 396 in five innings, 34 runs more than Saeed Anwar and 206 more than Nick Knight, England's second highest run-scorer. Three years later, a 36-year-old Stewart top-scored in a low-scoring home series against New Zealand with 215 runs in eight innings.

The youngest player involved in a Test series had never been the highest run-scorer of the series, until 1996, when a 23-year old Sachin Tendulkar took 428 runs off the England bowling attack in five innings. No one managed it for another decade, until Tamim Iqbal, not yet 19 at the time, scored 152 runs in New Zealand in 2007-08 in his debut series.

Phillip Hughes also top-scored in his debut series, against South Africa in 2008-09. Hughes, 20 at the time, was the youngest player in both squads and made 415 in six innings. while AB de Villiers' 357 was the next best aggregate. Hughes will have the opportunity to repeat his feat during the Ashes, unless England name a player younger than 20 years in their squad.

Sydney Barnes was the oldest player in England's tour party to South Africa in 1913-14, and none of the opposing players were older than 40 either. Age, however, didn't prevent Barnes from devastating South Africa on matting wickets. He took 49 wickets in four matches, a world record that still stands for most wickets in a Test series of any length. The next highest wicket-taker was South Africa's Jimmy Blanckenberg, and he played all five Tests for his 19 wickets.

Unlike the world record holders for most Test wickets before him - Courtney Walsh, Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan appear more than once in the table above - Kapil Dev rarely topped the wickets list in a series towards the end of his career because his form fell away as he got older. However, when he was younger, Kapil was the highest wicket-taker at home against Australia and Pakistan in 1979-80, series in which everyone else was older than him. He took 28 against Australia, one more than Dilip Doshi, and 32 against Pakistan, eight more than Sikander Bakht.

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