Multistat: 9.8

Tino Best was understandably distraught to find a scorpion in his helmet during his innings
© Getty Images



Tino Best’s batting average when he strode to the wicket at Sogbaston last Sunday for his 24th Test innings.

A couple of hours of outlandishly brilliant batsmanship and one history-shattering slogswipe later, Best’s average stood proudly at 13.85, after perhaps the most startlingly unexpected innings of all time, an innings of panache, style and, perhaps most surprisingly control, that left cricket’s collective flabber well and truly gasted.

What the hell happened? Had Tino drunk a pint of strawberry milkshake laced with the DNA of George Headley? Had he borrowed Gordon Greenidge’s central nervous system for the day? Was this the first time he had ever batted without distracting himself worrying about whether the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva might prompt the instant destruction of the planet? Or was he hallucinating, and finally responding to Freddie Flintoff’s famous “Mind the windows, Tino” goad at Lord’s eight years ago, by trying to repeatedly smash a window he thought he had seen at ground level on the extra-cover boundary? Who knows. Actually, Who probably does not know. It is beyond the understanding of humanity.

Best’s innings, regardless of the match situation or the relative placidity of the pitch, was a staggering, glorious performance, a beacon of hope to tailenders the world over. He fell annoyingly five runs short of a century and cricketing immortality. I was very excited at the imminent prospect of seeing a No. 11 score a hundred in a Test match. It had taken 135 years of Test cricket for any No. 11 even to come close to it. If it takes another 135 years for it to happen again, I probably will not be around to see it.

If Andrew Strauss had been thinking of the legacy to the sport-watching world, instead of his professional responsibility as an international cricketer, he would have contrived to “accidentally” trip over and head the ball for six.

Instead, he wrote himself into the Encyclopaedia of Great Sporting Killjoys, alongside the likes of Stewart Cink, the prosaic American golfer who snatched the 2009 Open from 59-year-old legend of the game Tom Watson, thus scuppering what would have the most remarkable story of superannuated sporting success in human history; and the Italian 1982 World Cup football team, who so rudely and needlessly knocked out a ludicrously exciting and supernaturally stylish Brazil side, when, for the good of football, sport, humanity, and all that is good and beautiful in the universe, they should have had the decency and honour to knock in a couple of late own goals. I am sure their manager and fans would have understood.

Best’s would unquestionably have been the most unanticipated Test century of all time. More so than Ajit Agarkar’s thunderbolt from the bluest possible shade of blue at Lord’s in 2002. Agarkar began with a Test average well below Tino’s 9.8 – a dismal 7.47 ‒ but his first-class record suggested this was a case of significant underachievement, as The Bombay Botham had registered a first-class century and averaged in the mid-20s. More so than Jason Gillespie’s Chittagong double-hundred, as he had posted a couple of Test half-centuries, four more 40-plus scores, and a four-hour blockathon against Kumble and Harbhajan in Chennai. And he was playing against Bangladesh. And more so than Jerome Taylor (previous average 13.6, highest score 31) smashing New Zealand for a sparkling hundred in Dunedin in December 2008, because Taylor was batting eight and had at least put together a run of useful 20s in Tests over the previous year.

(Incidentally, Taylor also painted his unexpected tail-end masterpiece on the fourth day of a rain-affected match, and the universe was so flabbergasted that it promptly sent a deluge to wash out the fifth day. Which suggests that West Indian tailenders clobbering brilliant innings against the statistical odds could solve all future droughts. I look forward to Devendra Bishoo being deployed by the United Nations to sub-Saharan Africa with a squad of club bowlers under strict instructions to feed him wide half-volleys.)

Best’s innings trumps all of these. Not only had Tino never passed the nervous 20s before in Tests, but also he had averaged 8 in first-class cricket over the previous two years, had a first-class highest score of 51, had effectively been out of Test cricket for seven years (if you exclude his two appearances in the dispute-ravaged pseudo-West-Indies team’s series with Bangladesh in 2009), and was facing a high-class England attack of proven internationals.