Bennett’s 139 for Zimbabwe at Trent Bridge was the fourth-highest score by a player aged 21 or younger in a men’s Test
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Bennet(t)-obsessed Hampshire and England’s Jane Austen would have written had she been a modern-day cricket statistician rather than an early 19th-century novelist, that a young cricketer should be pleased to sit alongside Don Bradman in a statistic.
In the disputatious maelstrom that is 21st-century conversation, even the most fervent internet antagonistas would struggle to claim that Bradman was not the greatest batter in Test history. He famously finished his Test career with a duck at the Oval in 1948 that saw his career average plummet to 99.94, almost 40 more than the next best figure recorded by anyone who has played more than 20 innings.*
He was approaching his 22nd birthday when, in the space of four Tests in 1930, he made scores of 254, 334 and 232, elevating batting to heights of scientific precision that bordered on the sadistic.
Before Brian Bennett unleashed his glorious array of boundary-pummelling strokeplay on Friday, the next best Test score in England by an under-22-year-old man was Peter May’s 138 for England against South Africa at Headingley in 1951.
England’s excellent performance against Test cricket’s weakest team will only be properly assessed and analysed in the light of their performance in the forthcoming showdown with India and their defining pace-bowling genius Jasprit Bumrah. It might be seen to have been a meaningless stroll against under-resourced opposition that camouflaged fundamental shortcomings. It might come to be considered a key staging post in the evolution of a still-positive but more ruthless team, in which individual players stepped up to a higher plane of productivity.
Bennett unleashed a glorious array of boundary pummelling strokeplay
Bennett’s innings, however, deserves to be remembered as one of the more astonishing by a visiting player in England. It was Zimbabwe’s fastest Test hundred, at 97 balls, breaking his team-mate Sean Williams’ record by nine deliveries; the sixth-fastest Test hundred by an opener against England; the second time a Zimbabwean has scored more than half of his team’s runs in a completed Test innings; the joint-second most boundaries hit (20) in a player’s first 100 runs in an innings against England; the second-highest score by an under-22-year-old opener against England.
In Zimbabwe’s follow-on, cricket lived up its well-earned reputation as the greatest leveller in the known universe. Bennett was dismissed for a scratchy one off 10 balls, becoming (if I have crunched the numbers correctly – and I am approximately 90% confident that I almost certainly have done) only the third ever player in a single day of men’s Test cricket to score a complete first-innings Test century, start to finish, and then be out in the second innings.
The others were South Africa’s Aubrey Faulkner, who made 122 not out and a duck on day two against Australia at Old Trafford in the Triangular Test series of 1912, and Mohammad Ashraful, who made a blazing 158 not out for Bangladesh against India on the third day in Chattogram (formerly Chittagong) in December 2004, before falling for three in the follow-on.
There have been a few other instances of players who were not out overnight completing a first-innings hundred, then being out in their second innings on the same day (only one of whom added 100 or more runs to his overnight score), but Bennett is in rare company as a case study in same-day cricketing triumph and disaster that will surely have If-penning poetry celeb Rudyard Kipling high-fiving himself in his grave.
Recent years have been even more difficult and marginalised than usual for Test cricket’s lower-ranked nations. Based on the interval since Zimbabwe’s last Test in this country, Bennett will be 43 by the time he next plays in or against England. He has already, in his seven-Test career, become the youngest men’s player ever to score a century and take a five-wicket haul in the same Test (a double achieved in just his second match, against Afghanistan last December), and, a month ago, made two half-centuries in a low-scoring match in Bangladesh to see his country to their first victory in four years.
How many opportunities he has to chisel himself further into the near 150-year story of Test cricket will reveal much about the priorities and management of the global game. For now, he can content himself in being second behind Bradman in a stat.
*Generally, there is no need for the fourth digit in a cricket stat. However, Bradman’s legendary average does not look quite right as 99.9, like Michelangelo’s David in a jockstrap.
Photograph by Mike Egerton/PA Wire
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