Benedict Bermange brings you the very best stats ahead of England's first Test against India.
Teundulkar and Dravid make formidable foes
Even though Test cricket had a 94-year head-start on ODI cricket, the 2,000th ODI was played back in April 2003 and the number of ODIs first exceeded the number of Tests back in May 1999.
The Durban Test in December 1948 between South Africa and England is the only match in Test history when a team scored
the winning run off the last possible ball of the match.
England won by two wickets when Alec Bedser and Cliff Gladwin scampered a leg-bye off Lindsay Tuckett's final delivery.
The
1,000th Test was played at Hyderabad in November 1984 between Pakistan and New Zealand. Javed Miandad scored a century in each innings as the home side triumphed by seven wickets.
Sachin Tendulkar may have scored the most Test runs and centuries, but it is
Rahul Dravid who has batted for the longest (more than 665 hours) and faced the most deliveries (29,125) in Test history.
Tendulkar - among all his other records - is the only player to score Test centuries more than 20 years apart. He goes into the Lord's Test with a total of 99 international centuries. Next on the list - a long way back - come Ricky Ponting (69), Jacques Kallis (57) and Brian Lara (53) - the only others with more than fifty.
Tendulkar and Dravid are only 130 runs behind Greenidge & Haynes is terms of runs added as a partnership. They already have the most century partnerships as a pair (19).
| Partners | Inns | No | Runs | High | Ave | 100 | 50 |
| GC Greenidge, DL Haynes (WI) | 148 | 11 | 6482 | 298 | 47.31 | 16 | 26 |
| R Dravid, SR Tendulkar (India) | 129 | 6 | 6352 | 249 | 51.64 | 19 | 24 |
| ML Hayden, JL Langer (Aus) | 122 | 4 | 6081 | 255 | 51.53 | 14 | 28 |
| DPMD Jayawardene, KC Sangakkara (SL) | 84 | 3 | 5018 | 624 | 61.95 | 12 | 22 |
| ML Hayden, RT Ponting (Aus) | 76 | 5 | 4765 | 272 | 67.11 | 16 | 22 |
India's
Vinoo Mankad was the first man to appear on both Lord's Honours Boards in the same Test. He scored 184 and took 5-196 in their 1952 Test.
Ian Botham repeated the feat against Pakistan in 1978.
From 1884 to 1980 Lord's hosted
71 Tests in which captains chose to bat on 66 occasions. Since then, in 51 Tests, captains have batted on 23 occasions and bowled on 28, including in
seven of the last eight.
England's record at Lord's has improved dramatically since 2000:
| Date | Played | Won | Lost | Drawn | Win % |
| 1980s & 1990s | 29 | 6 | 12 | 11 | 20.69 |
| 2000s & 2010s | 23 | 12 | 3 | 8 | 52.17 |
Alastair Cook has made six successive Test scores of 50 or more (and
Ian Bell currently has five). Three men share the Test record of seven - one of whom is the current England coach:
| Number | Name | Start | End | Scores |
| 7 | Everton Weekes | 1948 | 1949 | 141, 128, 194, 162, 101, 90, 56 |
| 7 | Andy Flower | 2000 | 2001 | 65, 183*, 70, 55, 232*, 79, 73 |
| 7 | Shiv Chanderpaul | 2006 | 2007 | 69, 74, 50, 116*, 136*, 70, 104 |
Bell has scored 1066 runs at an average of 106.60 in his 12 Tests since the start of England's tour to Bangladesh in early 2010. This is the longest period over which an England batsman has averaged more than 100, surpassing Ken Barrington's 11 Tests between June 1964 and July 1965.
Seven of the leading eight Test centurions have never made a hundred at Lord's. Tendulkar, Kallis, Ponting, Gavaskar, Lara, Steve Waugh, Dravid and Hayden have made a combined 292 Test centuries and have played a total of 27 Tests at Lords, but Steve Waugh's 152* in 1989 in the only century between them.
Andrew Strauss averaged just 6.75 in the series against Sri Lanka, the third-worst series average by any England captain. He has faced 290 deliveries from
Zaheer Khan in Tests, scoring 100 runs and being dismissed five times.
