Best Test innings since 2001 (part two)

Sorry correction, forgot to add the last two tests vs Pakistan. Tests played 63 wins 36 draws 14 losses 13 And series wins are now 16 since 2007

Whilst we may have only secured the number 1 ranking last year, the turn around in fortunes has happened much earlier than then, we have been playing winning cricket for some time now. So the "glory" accolades should take into consideration this success started much earlier Since India in 2007, SA have played 22 test series, losing only the return series at home against Australia, winning 15 and drawing 6. Since then SA is unbeaten away from home. Tests played 61 Wins 34 draws 14 losses 13

Faf innings just showed how SA cricket turned around and the fighting spirit use to be seen by the Aussie players which tormented us for so long was now visible with South Africa. That innings turned the tide and Australia were out of bullets after throwing everything at us. (theme tune from Real Steal playing in the background) That was the last sniff Australia would get as we pummeled them into the ground in Perthfontein

what about zim ban players sure they got some good 100s in last 13 years

Great knock, but against a very ordinary attack... Which pulls its value down a few cogs in my eyes.

Andy Bull guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 May 2013 10.18 BST Jump to comments (74) Don Bradman scored 270 in Australia's second innings of the third Test, still the record score by a No7 batsman in Test cricket. Photograph: Newspix / Rex Features The tale of this Test is a tale of Don Bradman. And, because Bradman stories are almost as predictable as Bond movies, you already have an idea how it will end: he will score tons of runs and get the girl. But Bradman in 1936 is not Bradman as we think of him today. This was before the myths had been written or the records etched in Wisden's tablets; a Bradman who was well beaten in his first two Tests as Australia's captain, out of form, unpopular with his team-mates, under attack from the press and the public, and out-manoeuvred by his opposite number. "Bradman began," Neville Cardus wrote in his account of the 1936-37 tour, Australian Summer, "as though riddled with fallibility." In the opening Test, his first as captain, Australia were set a target of 381. Caught on a wet wicket, they were bowled out for 58. Bradman made a duck, out second ball. In Sydney nine days later, he spent two days in the field watching Wally Hammond make 231. Then the rains came. Australia, on another damp pitch, were all out for 80. Bradman's contribution was a golden duck. Following on, he ground out 82 before he was bowled by a long-hop from Hedley Verity. Cardus reckoned it was a "stroke not fit for public view, it spoke of little hope, little resource." After two Tests England were 2-0 up, and in handsome style. They won by 322 runs in Brisbane, and an innings and 22 in Sydney. "Stories and rumours began to fly about," wrote William Pollock in the Daily Express. "'The Australian team was at sixes and sevens... Captaincy was affecting Bradman's cricket...' I heard people say Bradman's popularity was in the balance at the time, though I didn't believe it." Bradman did. "My own captaincy came in for a good deal of criticism," he wrote in Farewell to Cricket. "There was certainly a section of the public who thought the cares of captaincy were undermining my efficiency." England's captain, Gubby Allen, agreed. "Bradman seems very jumpy," he wrote in his diary. "And I should say, not at all well, and if we can keep him in that frame of mind we ought to win the rubber." The "rumours", as Pollock calls them, were close to the truth. After the defeat the Sydney Daily Telegraph explained that the "Selectors and the Board of Control are disturbed by the suggestion that the Test teams are not pulling together, and that Bradman has not the support generally given to an Australian captain." The ex-captain Bill Woodfull said in private that he knew Bill O'Reilly and Jack Fingleton had been campaigning for Stan McCabe to be captain. McCabe was made to issue a public denial. So that was the backdrop, and Melbourne was the stage. The largest crowd in the history of Test cricket came to see what would unfold, 350,534 of them in total. On the first day those who were there saw, so everyone thought, England win the Ashes. Bradman won the toss and chose to bat. He walked out into the middle, "an island green in the sunshine" as Cardus called it, with the score 7 for one, "amid a roar which told not only of hero worship but almost of supplication." Half an hour later, Allen brought Verity into the attack. His first delivery was an arm ball, which Bradman chipped straight to short leg. He was out for 13. Cardus "felt the spirit of defeatism in the Australian ranks, I thought, in fact, the rubber was ours now." Australia's day got worse. Their batting, Cardus wrote, was "tame and feminine. Even the running between the wickets suggested hungry men starving to death for crumbs of singles." Australia, on a true pitch, fell to 181 for six. And then, at five o'clock, the rains came, and "reduced the serried ranks to confusion". Play closed for the day. Allen felt the team were "in an impregnable position". The next morning the players woke to a wicket that Bradman described as "the worst I ever saw in my life". The umpires decided to restart the match after lunch. Bradman let his tail flail away for 30 minutes, taking Australia's score up to 200 for nine and then, and at what he thought was "the appropriate psychological moment", he declared. And so began what Bradman called "a sensational battle of tactics". McCabe opened the bowling with his medium pace. His third ball "came up as though jerked by invisible elastic to the top of Stan Worthington's bat" and was caught at silly point. "Never before" Cardus wrote, "have I seen a wicket so spiteful or eccentric." The other opener, Charlie Barnett, fell soon after, for 11. In the circumstances, it was a sound innings. "You didn't want cricketers on that pitch," wrote Pollock. "You wanted the Crazy Gang, Mickey Mouse, Einstein, and Euclid." Cardus captured it like this: "I could scarcely believe my eyesight as I saw the ball's preposterous behaviour. It described all manner of angles and curves; it was here, there, everywhere, spitting, darting, fizzing. One good length ball would rear to the batsman's chin; another exactly the same length, would flash into the blockhole like a stone skimming over ice." The wickets kept falling. Before long, England were 76 for seven and it was then, curiously, that Bradman began to get scared. He realised, he later said, that England "were losing wickets too quickly". He began to stall for time. He called his bowlers together and ordered them to avoid getting anyone else out by bowling wide of the wicket. Then he discreetly took out his close catchers and set them back on the boundary. "Every moment," he wrote, "I was afraid Allen would see through my tactics." Allen had his own quandary. His senior players were telling him to declare as soon as Hammond was out, when England's score was 68 for four, 132 runs behind, so that the bowlers could attack Australia for 50 minutes that evening. "I doubt if any Australian batsman could have stayed in 10 minutes," Cardus wrote. But Allen was worried that if he did, Bradman would counter by immediately declaring his own innings and putting England straight back in again. Then there was weather to worry about. More rain was on the way, and, as the next day was Sunday, a rest day, Allen knew that a declaration in haste could look pretty foolish when play resumed in different conditions on Monday. "He was caught in a difficult position," said Cardus. "Which called for the daring gambler's throw." Allen did finally throw the dice. He called the innings off with the score 76 for nine, and 45 minutes to play. But Bradman had more cards up his sleeve. He approached the umpires, George Borwick and John Scott, and asked them if they knew what Allen was doing. "We take it he has declared," Borwick said. "Well he didn't actually say so," pointed out Bradman. "I see what you mean," Borwick replied, "I'll go and confirm it." The umpire went off to enquire in the English dressing room, where the incensed Allen replied "That little blighter! Of course I have declared." Five more minutes had been wasted. Ingeniously, Bradman reversed his batting order to protect his best players from the worst of the conditions. He approached his two tailenders, O'Reilly and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, to open the innings. Fleetwood-Smith, a batsman so bad that he once said "going in at No10 was an adventure", finished his Test career with an average of nine, and a top score of 16. "I can still picture the look of incredulity on Chuck's face when I told him to put on his pads," Bradman wrote. "Why?" Fleetwood-Smith asked him. "Chuck, the only way you can get out on this wicket is to hit the ball," Bradman told him. "You can't hit it on a good one, so you've no chance on this." "There was a yell of laughter as the first pair revealed itself," Bruce Harris wrote in the Evening Standard. "O'Reilly and Fleetwood-Smith, of all batsmen." O'Reilly got out to his first ball, a brute from Bill Voce, so Bradman sent in his No10, Frank Ward, at No3. Fleetwood-Smith, just as Bradman predicted, couldn't get his bat on the ball. He and his two partners made six appeals against the bad light in the space of 12 balls, before the umpires relented and led the players off the pitch. England had managed to get through 18 balls. On Monday morning, after the rest day, "a gigantic crowd was in, sunning itself in placid contentment, men, women, children, sitting, standing, craning their necks, squatting on steps, even hanging on to rails." By then, Cardus reckoned, "the wicket, compared with Saturday's infamy, was a reformed character. A good batsman now at least had a chance to apply a normal technique." Still, Bradman was wary, and Voce, who had taken 13 wickets in the first two Tests, was making the ball spit. Fleetwood-Smith was out to the first ball he touched in his innings. So Bradman sent in more sacrificial batsmen, ordering them to play for time while the sun dried the pitch. At the fall of each wicket the crowd, 88,000 strong, and the largest assembled at a Test, would turn to the scoreboard expecting to see Bradman's name appear. But Keith Rigg came in at No4. He and Ward managed to bat for an hour, while the sun worked on the wicket. Then came Bill Brown at No5, and Fingleton at No6. Bradman finally came out at No7, just before 3pm. Australia were 221 ahead with half their side out. "The game's point of crisis," wrote Cardus. "Everything depended on Bradman and he knew it." After the match, his critics accused him of being cowardly by hiding down the order. "Some were unkind enough to suggest that my purpose was to avoid batting on a wet wicket," he wrote. "Of course it was; but only because such avoidance was necessary in the interests of the team." This was Bradman's dilemma as captain. Whatever was in his own best interest, was also, he rightly felt, in the best interest of the side. That afternoon, inbetween rain showers, Bradman made 56. The next morning, with the pitch dry and the sun out, and with what Cardus called "inhuman precision", Bradman set about batting England out of the game. Fifty became 100, became 150, became 200. By the close he had 248. He and Fingleton put on 346 together, a record stand for the sixth-wicket in Australian cricket. Years later, the Wisden website would decide, after many complex calculations, that Bradman's innings was the greatest played in the history of Test cricket, because of the difficulty of the conditions and the disparity between his score and everyone else's. But those who were there saw it differently. It was "congealed labour," Cardus reckoned, "related to his cricket in England of six years ago as the honest mason's productions are related to architecture." Bradman was stymied by Verity, who "shovelled damp coal on to Bradman's play" in one long spell from before lunch right through to after tea. "Nothing but consummate length and flight could have checked Bradman, in circumstances made for Bradman. Verity's length dropped with the persistence of water on a rock. I began to look for stalactites hanging down to the earth." Fingleton held one end "not obviously thinking of runs, which came to him by a sort of interest on the time accumulated at the wicket." He would write that this innings was the moment when Bradman's technique altered irrevocably, because "the batsman became subservient to the captain. He refused to take a single risk because of the state of the game." Bradman was suffering, though not nearly so badly as England's bowlers. He had a cold, and that night he came down with flu. He listlessly added 22 more to his score the next day, before falling to Verity, for 270, spread over seven hours, 38 minutes, his longest Test innings. It is still the record score by a No7 batsman in Test cricket, one of the unlikeliest of all his many records. He was too ill to take to the field for much of the fourth innings, when England did well to make 323. It was less than half of what they needed. They lost by 365 runs. In the fourth Test Bradman made 212, and in the fifth 169. Australia won both, and retained the Ashes 3-2. Bradman stayed on as Australia's captain for another 21 Tests, he lost one of them, when he injured his ankle and was unable to bat at The Oval. The 1936-37 Australia side are the only team, and Bradman the only captain, to win a five-match series after losing the first two Tests. Article history Sport Australia cricket team · England cricket team · Cricket Sorry to go off topic Tristan, but anybody who loves cricket should check out a great article in today's Guardian titled 20 great Ashes moments No4: Don Bradman records Wisden's best innings, 1937

While not trying to deny his glory...didn't the ozzies drop him 2 or 3 times along the way?