Does Joe Root have the legs to scale Mount Tendulkar? Premium

Obsessive fandom, cricket numbers, and the evolution of the sport from Charles Bannerman to Joe Root's pursuit of greatness.

The name Charles Bannerman may not ring a bell. Neither would the relevance of a March day at Melbourne, way back in 1877. But for those invested in the classicism of Test cricket and for statisticians obsessed with numbers, March 15 of that year should have a resonance.

On that day, which ushered in cricket’s inaugural Test, Australian opener Bannerman scored the first ever run in the game’s longest format. He went on to score 165 before retiring hurt and the host eventually defeated rival England by 45 runs. Since those old days, cricket has grown and evolved, and also dealt with disruptions like the two World Wars and the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

Numbers and obsessive fandom

Tests and the two limited-overs variants of ODIs and Twenty20Is presently co-exist, carving out distinct loyalties and granular commercial muscle. While results matter as they define the yardstick for judgement in a team sport, individual numbers offer relevance, trivia and also fuel obsessive fandom.

Readers of a certain vintage would have maintained a scrapbook, jotting down numbers stacked up by batters and bowlers. In the 1980s, it may have been a notepad with tables listed for Sunil Gavaskar, Vivian Richards, Javed Miandad, David Gower, Allan Border, Gordon Greenidge and Dilip Vengsarkar, with their individual scores in a Test noted down diligently, and then it would boil down to the whole thrill of finding out who was heading the batting race.

Gavaskar scaled ‘Mount 10,000’ with that dainty late cut of Pakistani spinner Ijaz Faqih at Ahmedabad in 1987. At that time it seemed too high a peak for anyone to scale again. It was presumed as being akin to Sir Don Bradman’s Test average of 99.94, a miracle that perhaps will remain untouched for eternity.

But cricket always presses forward, building new forts, moving past old ones, and triggering debates about different eras. Gavaskar’s world records, be it 10,122 Test runs or 34 centuries, eventually gave way to the modern stars even if it was his contemporary Border who first went past his Test tally.