#ashes A statistic I always enjoy appears each year in the First-Class Career Records section of Playfair, where the penultimate column within the batting averages shows the instances of batsman scoring 1000 runs in a season (‘where these have been achieved outside the British Isles they are shown after a plus sign’).
And it’s those numbers after the plus sign that I have always found particularly interesting. Nowadays its all overseas players such as H.D. Ackerman or Phil Jacques, but my 1983 Playfair reports that Geoff Boycott and Dennis Amiss both scored 1000 runs in an overseas season.
How they did this, I’m not sure - apart from England, Amiss only played for Warwickshire, and Boycott had just one season with Northern Transvaal in 1971-72. So an England tour seems the only way they could have reached the landmark.
So my question is - when was the last time an English batsman scored 1000 runs on an overseas tour with England? I ask, of course, because Alastair Cook has currently scored 521 runs in Australia, and still has five matches left to play.
Will the penultimate column of his career record in next year’s Playfair read ‘4+1’?
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