Sachin Tendulkar joined an elite group of Test players when he took the field against Bangladesh last month. He became just the fifth person to play Test cricket in four different decades having made his debut as a sixteen-year-old against Pakistan at Karachi in November 1989. Let’s have a look at the players he emulated and how they performed in the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings.

The first man to achieve this most remarkable of feats is also unique in that he participated in Tests in five different decades. That man is Wilfred Rhodes, who started his career as a specialist left-arm spinner in the 1890s who didn’t bat any higher than tenth in any of his first nine Tests. However, by 1912 he had graduated to opening the batting with Jack Hobbs and that pair still holds England’s first wicket record partnership in Ashes Tests with the 323 they added at Melbourne in February 1912. Rhodes also holds England’s record partnership for the tenth wicket too, and by the time he was recalled for his final appearances in 1930 he was back to number 10 playing as a spinner.

Batting-wise, he achieved 646 points and fourth place in December 1913 after he scored 152 against South Africa at Johannesburg in the match that Sydney Barnes took seventeen wickets. However it was with his bowling that he really hit the heights. He spent a total of twelve Tests at the top of the bowling tree between 1904 and 1907 peaking at 823 points. He was unfortunate that despite ending his first-class career just 31 runs short of the 40,000 run / 4,000 wicket double, he never topped the Test all-rounder table thanks to South African Aubrey Faulkner who reached his peak around the same time Rhodes did.

Jack Hobbs made his Test debut in 1908 and ‘The Master’ was only toppled from his lofty perch at the top of the Batting Ratings for one match in the entire period from 1912 to 1928 (by South African Herbie Taylor in 1923). He peaked at 942 at the end of 1912 which is the third-highest points tally ever achieved. His opening partnership with Herbert Sutcliffe was legendary and he spent more than a quarter of his Test career with a Rating of over 900 points. His career records of 61,760 first-class runs with 199 centuries will never be beaten and no-one else has ever scored a Test century at the age of 46. Even when he finally ended his international career Read more…

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India’s first Test captain, C K Nayudu was 37 when he led the team out for their inaugural match at Lord’s in 1932. At 57, he led Holkar to the final of the Ranji Trophy. At 62, he scored 80 against a Rajasthan attack which included internationals G S Ramchand and Vinoo Mankad. He played his last first class match at 69. When tales of longevity in cricket are discussed, it is impossible to ignore Nayudu, although his international career lasted only four years and seven Tests.

By one of those coincidences that seem pregnant with meaning, Nayudu shared a birthday with that other iron man of India, Sardar Vallabhai Patel.

In international cricket, the Indian whose record Sachin Tendulkar broke by playing twenty years was Lala Amarnath, the country’s first Test centurion in 1933. Lala played his last Test at Eden Gardens nineteen years later. Srinivas Venkatraghavan’s last Test was even more interesting. He played it in Antigua in the company of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan who hadn’t been born 18 years earlier when Venkat made his debut against New Zealand.

Two Pakistanis, Mushtaq Mohammed and Imran Khan had a twenty-year gap between their first and last Tests; in another year Tendulkar will go past that longevity record, and also that of Garry Sobers.

Imran played 88 Tests, Sobers 93, but the significant statistic of those who lasted longer at the international level is the fact that they averaged fewer than three Test matches a year. Jack Hobbs (22 years, 61 Tests), known simply as The Master played long enough to make 197 first class centuries, still a world record, but the West Indian great George Headley’s 24 years yielded only 22 Test matches. Robertson-Glasgow wrote of Frank Woolley (25 years, 64 Tests) that he was “easy to watch, difficult to bowl to, and impossible to write about. When you bowled to him there weren’t enough fielders, when you wrote about him there weren’t enough fielders…. He will rank as the greatest of left handers seen in the game.”

Woolley finished with 58, 969 first class runs, second overall only to Hobbs, he also Read more…

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One of our final links with the Golden Age of cricket has been broken with the death on Saturday of Hugh Dinwiddy, the last man to have played first-class cricket with Don Bradman and Jack Hobbs, as Martin Williamson notes on Cricinfo.

Dinwiddy played a handful of games for Cambrige University and Kent in the early 1930s, including a match against Surrey at Blackheath in which he made 45 (coincidentally I was at the same ground on the day he died watching the local rugby club beat Nuneaton). Hobbs, then 50 and in his penultimate season, made a hundred.

In 1934, Dinwiddy played for Cambridge against the touring Australians and scored exactly the same number of runs as Bradman - he was out for a duck. A year later, he played his final first-class game (Dinwiddy, not Bradman alas) and went on to teach and serve in the Navy. One point of interest for Terry Wise, this blog’s regular reader in Uganda, is that Dinwiddy later helped to establish Makerere University in Kampala, for which he was appointed OBE.

Dinwiddy’s death and the impending poppyfest that is Remembrance Sunday should make us cherish the few remaining links we have with the pre-war past. Earlier this year, the last person to see WG Grace play died and there are surely few around now who saw Hobbs or Sutcliffe or Larwood in their pomp. Anyone who saw England win their last Ashes Test at Lord’s for 75 years in 1934 would now be in their 80s or older. Even Bradman’s Invincibles is more than 60 years past.

I would love to hear from any readers - or their grandchildren - who saw the great names of pre-war cricket. What was Hutton like at the crease? Did he bat differently when he returned after the war with one arm shorter than the other? How great could Farnes have been if he hadn’t been killed in action? Was George Headley really as good as Bradman? How graceful was Read more…

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