In sport, records are made to be broken

All records are made to be broken. This is probably true, though some last or have lasted so long that one is all but entitled to suppose they will endure from here to eternity.

For instance, the Cricket Reference book Wisden reveals that no batsman has recorded a higher individual score against Yorkshire than the 318 (not out) made by W G Grace in 1876. Likewise, it is now seventy-two years since Don Bradman retired with a Test average of 99.94 and nobody has come within 20 points of matching that, let alone surpassing it.

Nevertheless, while we hail Jimmy Anderson’s achievement in becoming the first pace bowler to take 600 Test Match wickets and recognize it as remarkable, we suspect his final total may be overtaken, even perhaps by his old cobber, Stuart Broad. Of course, Anderson himself hasn’t finished; he may go on to take 620, 650, or even more. Indeed, he is now thirty-eight, an age at which most pace bowlers have exchanged cricket boots for loafers or even carpet slippers, but he is not yet in decline and might take heart from the example of Geoff Chubb.

“Who?” some might quite reasonably say. Well, he was a South African fast-medium bowler who played only five Tests, all in England in 1951, in which he took 21 wickets at an average of 27 – respectable but not remarkable figures. What is more remarkable is that he was two months past his fortieth birthday when he played his first Test. About half his wickets were in the lower half of the English order, but tail-end wickets count the same as top-order ones – and in any case, Denis Compton and the young Peter May were also among his victims.

Despite fears often expressed about the future of Test cricket, so many more Tests are now played all year round that players are almost bound to surpass records if they maintain their form and stay in the team long enough. Anderson has played more than twice as many Tests as Fred Trueman, the first bowler to take 300 Test wickets. Sometime this winter, assuming scheduled matches against Sri Lanka and India go ahead, Joe Root will play his hundredth Test. Of great Yorkshire predecessors, Len Hutton played 79, Herbert Sutcliffe 54, Geoffrey Boycott 108, his last when he was 41. Root is not yet 30.

It is the same in other sports. There are old rugby fans who will tell you that England has never had as brilliant and exciting a fly-half as Richard Sharp. If you doubt that, read the lovely article by Robert Kitson which appeared in The Guardian a few years ago and google footage of the famous try he scored at Twickenham to win the Calcutta Cup in 1963. Yet Sharp does not figure among record-makers, he played only 14 times for England and won two Lions caps against South Africa. Like many in the amateur days, he retired in his mid-twenties, rugby taking third place to family and work.

The Scottish captain at Twickenham that day was Ken Scotland, for me the nonpareil of full-backs (though he was at fly-half in that match). I have just written an introduction to his Autobiography which is being published by Polaris in Edinburgh. The introduction was necessary because Ken is too modest; reading his account of the 1959 Lions tour, you wouldn’t think that New Zealand journalists waxed lyrical about him. As with Sharp, his international days ended much earlier than such careers do now that the game is professional, in his case when work took him to Aberdeen, and he played in a much lower class of club rugby.

Neither he nor Sharp set up records, only memories that remain alive for those old enough to have watched them play. Today, when as many as eight replacements are waiting on the bench, it is possible to get more caps than Sharp without ever playing a full eighty minutes of a match.

Then, as with Test cricket, much more international rugby is now played than ever before. Sharp and Scotland played at a time when there were four matches in what was then the Five Nations and only an occasional match against a Southern Hemisphere touring side. Overseas summer tours were very rare; you had to play nine or ten seasons to get forty caps.

In some sports, it is technology that has led to record-breaking. Nobody, for instance, will ever again set athletics records on a grass or cinder track. The average professional or leading amateur golfer will hit a far longer ball than the champions of fifty years ago, let alone those who played a hundred years back in the days of hickory-shafted clubs, while club-heads today reduce the margin of error, sometimes, it seems, coming close to eliminating it.

For most of its long history football has been less concerned with statistics than other sports and consequently less interested in records. This is changing. Records of goal-scoring have of course always been kept, but we now have records of what are known as “assists”, and computers can tell you how many metres a player has run in a match. In rugby, it is only recently that we have been made aware of how many tackles a player has made, and if football and rugby had a true equivalent of Wisden, this would be packed with statistical information never previously collected. Good fun of course for all of us who are gluttons for such information. It probably won’t be long before we can pore over a huge variety of football and rugby averages and find new records being made, and then broken every second year.

All this, of course, is good harmless fun, so long as we keep a sense of perspective. If asked to compare, for instance, Jimmy Anderson’s remarkable achievements with Fred Trueman’s sixty or so years ago, I would fall back on a judgement pronounced by an old St Andrews caddy. When asked in the 1920s who was greater, Bobby Jones or Young Tom Morris, he paused, sucked on his pipe, and dourly said, “baith of them played perfect gowf”.