Why race to 1,000 runs still retains its mystique
It is back on. The race to score 1,000 runs in May, or at least by the end of it, is part of cricket’s folklore. It was like the annual race to be the first clipper to bring tea from China to London – but even more like the race to sail through the Northwest Passage, because in most years conditions made it impossible.
This domestic season starts tomorrow with seven or eight championship games for each county in April and May, without any limited-overs games getting in the way or disturbing the batsmen’s rhythm. Icebergs may lurk well hidden, but this passage is otherwise open.
Batsmen such as Rory Burns and Ollie Pope of Surrey, and Dan Lawrence of Essex, could each have as many as 16 innings to reach this historic target. Scoring 1,000 first-class runs by the end of May would not only immortalise their names but guarantee them a place in the England team when the first Test against New Zealand starts on June 2.
WG Grace set this bar when he scored 1,016 runs in May 1895, and needed no more than 10 innings to do so.
Only two others have reached 1,000 in the month of May, Wally Hammond and Charlie Hallows. On six other occasions batsmen have started in April and scored 1,000 by the end of May, including Don Bradman, twice (once in only nine innings), which proves this is no niche feat but a hallmark of excellence.
Runs are harder to make at the start of a season. Pitches are damper, bowlers are fresher – and white-ball games have been cluttering up modern calendars. This season, continuing Covid-19 bans on crowds have brought half the championship games into one big bloc at the start – the counties split into three conferences of six teams. At the end of August, the top two counties in each conference will play the top two in the other two conferences to determine who will contest the Bob Willis Trophy final at Lord’s. Complicated but, in current circumstances, worth trying.
Graeme Hick was the last to score 1,000 runs by the end of May, in 1988. He was a young god, who only turned 22 during that month, fresh-faced, a simple Zimbabwean country boy, as far from egotistical as Sir Jack Hobbs in his day, the world at his feet.
It helped Hick that he posted a double century against Lancashire in April; that four-day championship games were being introduced, which allowed a side to bat for two days; and that he scored almost half the runs he needed in one innings, his unbeaten 405 against Somerset at Taunton, one of only 10 quadruple hundreds ever made in first-class cricket.
Sometimes a whole generation has passed, as in the present case, before another batsman has scored 1,000 runs by the end of May. Often a batsman has verged on the landmark, then run out of steam, or tensed up amid the publicity, leaving it as one of the rarest feats. Such was Hallows’ relief in 1928 on scoring his 1,000th that he was dismissed by the next ball.
This season it would be good for English cricket if batsmen have to face something more than seam and swing in pursuit of this historic landmark.
Last season, truncated as it was, Somerset reached the BWT final without taking a single wicket with spin. Will any county now dare to give the new ball to a left-arm spinner and ask him to slide it into the pads, like Axar Patel kept doing in India? English cricket has been shown as rather monochrome by the events in Sri Lanka and India during the winter, when spinners brought a brisker tempo to our sport.
Reaching the milestone by the end of May would guarantee a place in the England team