10 Things # 32

A short game, a long game, a photo, a K-Tel rabbit hole

1/ Australia beat Sri Lanka steadily, India beat England rapidly, but South Australia beat Western Australia fastest of all. Cripes.

2/ The match, which has left a heavy bruise on WA’s chances of defending their custody of the Sheffield Shield, is the shortest outright result in the 133-year history of domestic first-class cricket: 763 balls versus the 822 balls of this game two-dozen years ago. SA now lead the Shield table, and host bottom side Tasmania in a week’s time. Didn’t see that coming, eh?

3/ Today, by contrast, marks the anniversary of the first Australian first-class triple century: Billy Murdoch’s 321 (495 minutes, 38 fours) for New South Wales against Victoria in 1882, which became part of what The Argus, with an eye on antiquity, called ‘the most extraordinary contest that has ever taken place in Australia, or possibly in England, where the game originated, and was one of the established national pastimes before a white population had been established in Australia.’

Victoria scored 315 and 322 and still lost by an innings and 138 runs, thanks to NSW’s 775, in what also became a fascinating relic of the mores of timeless cricket. Murdoch, a country lawyer, skipped the fourth day in order to appear in court in Cootamundra, undertaking an eleven-hour railway journey each way in order to do so. In his absence, NSW deployed no fewer than four stopgap keepers, who conceded twenty-seven byes. The Argus decried this: ‘This conduct will not bear frequent repetition without the game being lowered considerably in the estimate of the public.’ First-class matches lasting 763 deliveries aren’t going to help that estimate either…..