Dot, Dot, Dot, Dot …….

Featuring Roach, Washbrook, Carlisle et al.

The ‘dot’ is the scorers’ greatest contribution to cricket’s lexicon. Ever since cricket advanced from being recorded by making notches on a stick to writing on paper, the dot has been used to notate a ball off which no runs were scored. It is now used in general speech. Balls that are not scored off are universally referred to as ‘dots’. You won’t hear anyone refer to them as ‘noughts’ as you would do for ‘ones’, ‘twos’, ‘threes’, etc.

I worked for TV on most of the Test matches played in Zimbabwe between 1999 and 2001. There was occasionally some dour cricket. In one match, Dave Houghton did two consecutive commentary sessions of half an hour without describing a run (there were some runs in the half hour between his two sessions).

Stuart Carlisle was a decent player for Zimbabwe in this period. He was a notable purveyor of the block. This being the early days of the internet, some of the more cruel amongst the TV production crew suggested he should start a website and call it “StuartCarliseDotDotDotDotDotDot.com”. He played what I regard as the most bizarre Test innings I have witnessed when he scored 21 off 96 balls against Bangladesh at Harare in 2001 consisting of 85 dots, nine singles and two sixes over third man (this was back in the day before sixes over third man were as routine as they are now).

Anyway, I digress. The main inspiration for this post is Kemar Roach’s innings during West Indies’ great save against New Zealand at Christchurch in December. Roach and Justin Greaves batted unbeaten for 68.1 overs for the 7^th wicket to save the match. Roach’s share was 58 off 233 balls. A feature of this innings was that he remained on 53 for 72 balls without scoring. In a world of imperfect information, I make this the 9^th longest such run in Test history. We don’t have enough ball-by-ball information, with enough accuracy, to be definitive on this. But what stands out is that Roach had already scored 53 before this sequence. As a general rule, blockathons occur early in a batter’s innings. Peter Nevill has the record for most consecutive dot balls faced in a Test innings when he faced 90 while on nine in Australia’s vain attempt to save the Test v Sri Lanka at Pallekele in 2016, while another wicket-keeper, England’s John Murray’s 79 balls v Australia at Sydney in 1963 remains the record before getting off the mark.

Of the 82 cases of 50+ consecutive dot balls faced in Test cricket that I have in my database, 22 are before scoring and 48 (comfortably over half) are before reaching double figures. Having long scoreless sequences when you have already reached your fifty are rare, sufficiently rare that only South Africa’s Bruce Mitchell has a longer sequence after scoring 50 than Roach. He managed to get stuck on 56 for 85 balls on his way to 73 against England at Johannesburg in 1938. But even Roach and Mitchell don’t match the extraordinary effort by Cyril Washbrook. Washbrook was famously the second half of the Hutton & Washbrook opening pair for England in the 1950s. (In today’s world where the kid’s like to ‘ship’ people they may have been known as “Washton” or, more likely, “Huttbrook”). Against the West Indies at Lord’s in 1950, Washbrook went serenely to 114 before facing 66 consecutive dot balls without adding to that. The last 62 of those balls were bowled by Sonny Ramadhin who bowled him with the 62^nd of them. He didn’t even add to his score. This is easily the highest score a man has been on when facing a 50-plus ball sequence of dots in Test cricket.

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