Former England cricket team captain Joe Root became just the 14th batter to score 10,000 test runs when he reached the milestone in his match-winning 115* innings against New Zealand at Lord’s on Sunday. Root, 31, is the only one in that select group of run scorers who still plays Test cricket. Indian cricket team legend Sunil Gavaskar was the first to enter the elite club. On March 7, 1987, Gavaskar scored his 10,000th test run in a match against Pakistan in Ahmedabad.
Gavaskar took his Test 10,000th run from the bowling alley from Pakistani spinner Ijaz Faqih. When Gavaskar was the first to touch the historic landmark, the game was halted for quite some time as the crowd from Ahmedabad took to the field to congratulate the legend.
Watch: The moment when Sunil Gavaskar became the first batter to score 10,000 runs in Tests
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Sunil Gavaskar scored his 10,000th run in the Ahmedabad Test when he played late cut-off Ijaz Fakih in 1987.
Gavaskar became the first cricketer to climb Mount Everest — 10000 test runs
Politeness: @Zohaib1981 pic.twitter.com/c8Vqd2tla8
— Sarang Bhalerao (@bhaleraosarang) February 19, 2021
Speaking of the achievement and joy of becoming the very first 10,000 club entrant, Gavaskar once told Indian Express: “I knew I needed 57 runs. Normally I don’t look at the scoreboard. But once you get a 50 reached , you get a round of applause. At that moment you realize. If I’m not mistaken, I reached 50 with a single. So I was aware that there are 7 runs left now.
“Once you get to that 10,000, it’s absolutely magical. Magical because it hadn’t been done before. Even 9,000 hadn’t been done before, and I did it. But 9,000 is a four-digit number. 10,000 is a number of five digits, so it was almost like climbing Mount Everest for the first time.”
promoted
Root is now part of the elite club. Root’s current batting average is a fraction below 50, the mark of an all-time great, with his number of 26 hundreds at this level surpassed for England only by retired Sir Alastair Cook’s 33. And Sunday’s innings suggest that there are many more runs to come, with Root now freed from what he said afterwards had become a “very unhealthy relationship” with the England captain.
(With AFP inputs)
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