Sad news that Bill Frindall has been run out, courtesy of a dodgy call from the non-strikers’ end. From the BBC’s tribute:
“These are serious men, who will take up hours of your life if you let them, arguing about whether Fred Trueman lighting his pipe 21 times between lunch and tea was a record for an Oval Test against Bangladesh at Trent Bridge in June.”
So wrote Martin Johnson about Bill Frindall and the cricket statistician fraternity in the Daily Telegraph, after England’s Andrew Strauss played all around a Shane Warne delivery in the fifth Ashes Test in Sydney in January 2007, a dismissal which saw the leg-spinner become the first bowler to take 700 Test wickets in history.
According to Frindall, however, Warne was still six wickets short of the mark. Why? Because of his refusal to recognise the status of the so-called Super Series Test match in Sydney in 2004 between Australia and a Rest of the World XI.
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