cricket record=number+story

There was a cricinfo article on Jayawardene's batting prowess during his recent Test partnership record of 624 runs with Sangakkara, in which his own contribution was a mammoth 374 - highest by a Sri Lankan and only 26 runs shy of Lara's world record. I find the timing of the article interesting in the context of my last post on the fickle nature of a cricket record. Each cricket record is a sum total of two factors: a number that enters the record book, and a performance/talent that produces the number and is the stuff of the history book. Record books talk of only numbers and hide the real story behind those numbers, the performances as unique as the circumstances in which the records are made. For example, in that post I argued Graeme Pollock's career batting average of 60.97 runs - currently a record among all present and past cricketers who played at least 20 Tests (discounting Bradman's 99.94 that cannot be placed in any comparative setting) - as having benefited from his short playing career of only 23 Test matches. What I did not say, and no record book will say either, is that Bradman himself considered Pollock to be the finest left-handed batsman the game of cricket has ever produced. Or, take Kapil Dev's hurricane knock of 175 against Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup, a record then but now holds the 9^th place in record books. Consider the circumstance - top five batsmen already back in the pavilion with only 17 runs on board, and all seemed lost when Kapil stepped in and produced one of the greatest batting exhibits of all time in his 138-ball knock, a performance that played no small part in the team's eventual (and only) World Cup victory. These are the stories that separate cricket records from most other sports records. I mean, we do not get to read an article about how someone runs the fastest 100-meter or jumps the longest yard. Those are records without stories, and people do not talk about them once they are surpassed (except, maybe, Bob Beamon's long jump record of 1968 Olympics that I mentioned in my last post - we still remember it because this record stood unbeaten for 23 years, which is itself a record for track and field events). There is the cliché "form is temporary but class permanent", maybe we can adapt it for a cricket record: "number is temporary but story permanent".