Cheteshwar Pujara vs Mohammad Azharuddin: Why cricket needs a scale for aggregate records

Indian cricketer Cheteshwar Pujara recently played his 100th Test match.

On the morning of the Delhi Test match, as cricket fans celebrated Cheteshwar Pujara’s 100th Test, I got a message in a WhatsApp group: how is it possible that Pujara has played more Tests than Mohammad Azharuddin?

This bizarre question somehow made sense. Since the 1960s, Azharuddin was the first Indian captain with an unquestioned, uninterrupted stint at the helm that lasted longer than five years.

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Towering in every sense of the word, Azharuddin was the senior man of the Indian team of the 1990s as future giants like Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble established themselves. And all that was after he had spent five years in the Indian team, playing under five captains.

Yet, across 15 years, Azharuddin played 99 Test matches — one fewer than what Pujara played in 12 years. It was not a reflection on their respective careers. If anything, Azharuddin missed four Test matches (all of them in the 1980s); Pujara, 26.

The calculations are easy: India play about 50 percent more Test matches these days than they used to back then — seven a year in the Azharuddin era to 10.5 a year during Pujara’s career — and that is despite the added burden of Twenty20 Internationals as well as a two-month break for the IPL.

Today’s cricketers are playing more international matches (not all matches, cricketers of the yesteryear actually bore a greater workload — but let us leave that for another day) than their counterparts in previous generations. Aggregate records are, as a result, changing hands more often.

Sunil Gavaskar had gone past Geoff Boycott’s world record of 8,114 Test runs in 1982-83. Four seasons later, when he became the first to 10,000 runs, he seemed set to hold the top spot for some time.

Three and a half decades later, 14 men have breached the 10,000-run barrier. Gavaskar has disappeared outside the top 12. Sachin Tendulkar’s 15,921 runs — the current world record — are 57 per cent more than Gavaskar’s.

Bowlers have fared worse. When Fred Trueman became the first bowler to take 300 wickets, in 1964, he declared that whoever broke his record would be “bloody tired”. Trueman has now been pushed to 36th place. Of the 35 men above Trueman, eight are active Test cricketers.

No one took 400 wickets by 1990. In the 1990s, Kapil Dev’s 434 wickets seemed a large number. Now, Muttiah Muralitharan has 800 Test wickets — and only because he outlasted Shane Warne by three years. Given how they pushed each other throughout the career, both men could have ended on a tally closer to 850.

Test cricket’s fading away, or at least its polarisation, seems imminent, which is the sole reason these records may not be broken again. But that does not alter the fact that these records belong to cricketers who have outlasted their predecessors.

Of course, Some records are virtually impossible to surpass. Don Bradman’s batting average of 99.94 and Jim Laker’s 19 wickets in a Test match have stood for decades, and are likely to for some time.

But these are not aggregate records. Bradman got that average by achieving unmatched excellence over a career spanning two decades. It is a record of averages, of consistency.

Laker’s feat was a moment, an example of a cricketer achieving something exceptional over the course of one match and no longer. Neither record is guaranteed by longevity.

Records pertaining to “most in a Test career” — runs, hundreds, wickets, five-wicket hauls, catches, stumpings — on the other hand, are dependent on duration of career. A cricketer with more matches is likelier to outdo someone with fewer matches. Tendulkar has scored the most Test runs and hundreds, but he has also played the most Test matches.

The point is probably clear. With the number of matches going up, cricketers will play more matches than they would have in previous generations. As a result, the aggregate record will not only invariably lie with the most recent generation, legends of the yesteryear will slide down the ladder.

That brings us to an obvious question. What is the problem with that? To paraphrase one of cricket’s clichés, are records not meant to be broken?

The forgotten ones

There used to be a time when Arthur Shrewsbury held the world record for most Test runs. Clem Hill’s 3,412 runs stood for 22 years. Wally Hammond’s 7,249 runs, for 33 years — a duration longer than what Allan Border, Brian Lara, and Tendulkar have managed between them.

Similarly, Syd Barnes (189) and Clarrie Grimmett (216), consecutive holders for most wickets, held the world record for 39 years between them — though the period was punctuated by two World Wars.

While Hammond, Barnes, and Grimmett are still revered in some quarters, Shrewsbury and Hill, batting giants of their time, have stopped being relevant to anyone barring that curious species of cricket historians.

Sporting legacies seldom last a century, so that was perhaps expected.

What is relevant is whether cricketers of two eras can be compared based on career aggregates alone, or whether the records of cricketers of the yesteryear can be scaled up using an index that will bring some parity between Hill (49 Tests between 1896 and 1911-12) and Rahul Dravid (164 between 1996 and 2011-12).

From quality of pitches to protective gear, travel logistics to sports science, the periods — separated by exactly a century — are already different in myriad ways. There are sophisticated methods to compare averages across eras, but not aggregates.

And that is just in Test cricket. The Twenty20 landscape has been changing at an even faster rate.

It is in the nature of cricket fans to celebrate aggregates. Runs, hundreds, wickets. It is how we often remember cricketers. The wait for Gavaskar’s world record 30th Test century had led to as much mass hysteria when Tendulkar approached his 100th hundred across formats — an artificial, if slightly illogical record in the first place.

The reactions were replicated as Virat Kohli approached Tendulkar’s record, only to be put on hold as Kohli lost form. The record-holders in the pre-Gavaskar era — the giants on whose shoulders Gavaskar, Tendulkar, and Kohli have stood — have as good as been erased from mainstream public memory.

While history can be cruel, it is perhaps not fair to let the weight of time to erase the memories of the past. More cricket is inevitable as time moves on, but, perhaps, it is time to use a scale of some sort that will help pit aggregate records of one period against another.