Chennai Test: 1st day's statistical highlights...
Mohandas Menon
• Mumbai's Sameer Dighe and Sairaj Bahutule became the 235th and 236th players to appear for India in Tests, while Nilesh Kulkarni was making a comeback to the Indian Test side after a gap of three years and four months while missing 24 Tests in between. He last appeared against Sri Lanka at Nagpur in November 1997.
• Dighe, incidentally became the 28th player to keep wickets for India in Tests.
• Mark Waugh (70), when on 46, became the sixth Australian and the 20th batsman in Test history to aggregate 7000 runs. By doing so in his 111th Test match he needed the maximum Tests to reach this landmark than any of the other 19 batsmen. His twin sibling, Steve, need 110 Tests when he achieved his milestone in 1998-99. However Mark Waugh needed far to less innings (183) than Englishman Alec Stewart who reached the 7000-run milestone in 191 innings just last month in the first Test against Sri Lanka
at Galle.
• Matthew Hayden (147 not out) recorded his third and highest Test hundred of his career in 16 Test matches. He bettered his previous highest score of
125, which he made against the West Indies at Adeliade in January 1997. Incidentally it was his 47th first-class hundred in 185 matches.
• Interestingly, Hayden's hundred was the sixth by a left-handed batsman against India in the last five matches, in four months, out of eight hundreds scored during this period. The left-handers being Zimbabweans Andy Flower (183 and 232 - both unbeaten) & Alistair Campbell (102), Australians
Adam Gilchrist (122) and Hayden (119 and 147 not out), while Zimbabwean Grant Flower (106 not out) and Australian Steve Waugh (110) were the right-handers to record hundreds against India.
• Steve Waugh during his unbeaten innings of 43, when on 30, went past the Test run aggregate of 8900 runs of England's Graham Gooch. He now occupies
the third position in the all-time list of run aggregates among Test batsmen. With 8914 runs in 135 matches, Waugh is just behind fellow Australian Allan Border (11174 runs) and Indian Sunil Gavaskar (10122) in terms of highest Test run aggregates.
• Left-arm spinner Nilesh Kulkarni, meanwhile has extended his wicketless spell to 557 balls (92.5 overs) since claiming a wicket (of Marvan Atapattu)
off his very first ball in Test cricket at the Premadasa Stadium way-back in August 1997.
• Australia's score of 326-3 was the maximum runs scored by any team at Chepauk on the first day of a Test match. In the 25 Test matches played at this ground since 1934, the previous maximum runs scored on the first-day was the 315-1 by West Indies on January 27, 1949. West Indies went on to score 582 by close on the next day.
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