Over in 642 balls: India win the shortest Test ever played to completion

It only took the tourists 107 overs of cricket to level up a two-match series, winning with three-and-a-half days to spare in Newlands

Nick Friend | 04/01/2024 at 13:24

All over in 642 balls, India's seven-wicket win over South Africa goes into the history books as the shortest Test ever played to completion.

It only took the tourists 107 overs of cricket to level up a two-match series, winning with three-and-a-half days to spare in Newlands.

A remarkable, crazy game of cricket, with 176 the highest team total by either side, 55 the lowest.

And yet, there was room for Aiden Markram to pulverise a superb hundred on a difficult pitch against Jasprit Bumrah and co.

He made 106 in 103 deliveries, ending with 60.2 per cent of his country's final score. At the point of dismissal, the record of Charles Bannerman – set in 1877 and still standing – for the highest percentage of a team total was under serious threat.

In less granular terms, it was simply an extraordinary feat in the context of an innings that saw 12 as the next-highest score. Four players in the match reached 30.

Of the 33 wickets to fall in the game, 29 were caught, three were bowled, Mohammed Siraj was farcically run out. There wasn't an lbw across the two-match series, just the third time in Test history that has been the case.

Day two followed much the same pattern as the carnage of the first, during which perhaps the maddest passage played out. India lost six wickets without adding a run in 1.5 overs to fall from 153 for 4 to, well, 153 for 10.

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^{Dean Elgar was presented with a shirt signed by the India squad to commemorate his Test retirement (Rodger Bosch/AFP via Getty Images)}

In the now-infamous words of Ravi Shastri on commentary: "If someone went round the corner for a dump and has come back, India has been bowled out for 153!"

There were other quirks along the way: Tristan Stubbs' Test career has begun inauspiciously, just the second man to be dismissed twice on the first day of life as a Test cricketer, the first instance since Harry Butt in 1896.

At the other end of the spectrum, Dean Elgar leaves the Test arena having, too, been dismissed twice in a day. He earned a congratulatory hug – for his career, not his day's work – from Virat Kohli on his way off. Those two have played this game for long enough to know how fickle it is. Elgar, ironically, was player of the series for his part in a superb win at Centurion in what was a much more normal Test match.

In all, there were six ducks, five of them coming in that madcap passage of play as India crumbled. But by then, they almost had enough runs already. The player of the match, for that reason, was Siraj, whose six-wicket haul before lunch on the first morning – a rarity in itself – did the damage from which South Africa simply couldn't recover.

Bumrah took six wickets in the second innings, with the run-chase concluded in just 12 overs.