Trent Bridge chases, and teenage spinners

Stats highlights from another engrossing day at Trent Bridge

12-Jul-2013

Stuart Broad added priceless lower-order runs, England v Australia, 1st Investec Test, Trent Bridge, 3rd day, July 12, 2013

The highest fourth-innings target successfully chased at Trent Bridge is 284, by England against New Zealand in 2004. In that game England, who batted second, trailed New Zealand by 65 after their first innings. It's exactly the difference in the first-innings scores in this match, except that Australia, the team batting second, took the lead here. The highest by a visiting team is 208, by West Indies way back in 1980.

England's star of the day was Ian Bell, who batted patiently and faced 228 deliveries - the second-highest he has ever faced in an innings against Australia - to score an unbeaten 95. It's his 13th fifty-plus score against Australia, but he has previously converted only one of those into a century. During the course of that innings, Bell also became the 14th England batsman to get to 6000 Test runs. It's a superb achievement, but his last 1000 runs have been rather arduous, stretching over 20 Tests and 36 innings. His previous 1000 runs (4000 to 5000) by contrast, required only ten Tests and 14 innings.

Bell's 108-run undefeated stand is his second century partnership with Broad. The previous one had come against South Africa at Lord's, exactly five years ago, when they put together 152 for the seventh wicket.

Broad's Test batting average at Trent Bridge is 42.14, which is higher than the corresponding averages of all the specialist batsmen in England's current team.

Alastair Cook's 50 took all of 165 balls - a strike rate of 30.30 - which is the slowest of his 55 fifty-plus scores; the previous-slowest was his 60 off 178 balls at Headingley in 2008.

It was a surprise, though, that Cook got out after getting that half-century, because it was his first half-century as captain. On the seven previous occasions when he had gone past 50, he had scored hundreds. His previous six fifty-plus scores - dating back to July last year - had all been hundreds too.

Ashton Agar continued his extraordinary debut by dismissing Cook and Jonny Bairstow and finishing the day with 2 for 82, thus also becoming the first Australian teenage spinner to take a Test wicket. The previous youngest Australian spinner to take a Test wicket was Graham Hole, who was a month over 20 when he took a wicket against England in 1951. India lead the way in terms of wickets for teenage spinners, with 166 - BS Chandrasekhar and Ravi Shastri took 27, L Sivaramakrishnan took 26, and Harbhajan Singh and S Venkataraghavan 21 each.

The 110-run partnership between Cook and Kevin Pietersen took 296 deliveries, which means the scoring rate was 2.22 per over. Among third-wicket partnerships for England since 2000 which lasted beyond 40 overs, this is the second-slowest: the only slower one was between Mark Butcher and Nasser Hussain against West Indies in Port of Spain in 2004, when they put together 120 in 346 balls, a rate of 2.08 per over.

Ashton Agar Kevin Pietersen Alastair Cook Stuart Broad Ian Bell Australia England England vs Australia Australia tour of England and Scotland

S Rajesh is stats editor of ESPNcricinfo. Follow him on Twitter