Bruce Yardley had remarkably held the record for fastest fifty by an Australian – a 29-ball knock from No. 8 against the might of the West Indies pace attack
Brydon Coverdale at the SCG06-Jan-20171:04
The fastest Test fifties
The list of fastest hundreds in Test cricket reads like a who’s who of batting: Brendon McCullum, Viv Richards, Misbah-ul-Haq, Adam Gilchrist, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, David Warner, Chris Gayle, Roy Fredericks, Majid Khan. A few allrounders are scattered through, too – Jack Gregory and Kapil Dev, for example – but few bowlers. It is usually too difficult to sustain the agricultural style long enough to reach a century.But the list of fastest fifties is quite different. There are of course fine batsmen among them – Misbah, Jacques Kallis, Shahid Afridi, to name a few. But the group is also populated by tail-enders who rode their luck: Shane Shillingford, Dale Steyn and Tim Southee, for example. And there is one such name that has sat there for 38 years, the owner of the fastest Test fifty by an Australian: Bruce Yardley.At least, the record-holder until today. When Warner smashed a struggling Yasir Shah over mid-off for six from his 23rd ball of this innings, he had recorded the second-fastest Test fifty of all time. Only Misbah, whose 21-ball effort in Abu Dhabi in 2014 humiliated the Australians, has done so quicker. And, of course, it also meant that Warner had broken the long-standing mark set by Yardley in 1978.It is perhaps surprising that the milestone has stood for so long, especially as Adam Gilchrist’s 96-Test career, in which he reached fifty on 43 occasions occurred in the meantime. What is not surprising is that it should be Warner to eventually rewrite the record.For the second time in this Test, Warner did something special. On day one, he became just the fifth man in history to score a hundred before lunch on the first day of the Test – and the first to do so in Australia. One of the most remarkable features of that innings was that included not a single six. It was about as restrained as such a brisk innings can be.But his fastest fifty was different. The fourth over of the innings, bowled by Yasir, began with two sixes contemptuously smashed over long-on for sixes. A pair of fours followed, and Warner looked a realistic chance of producing the highest-scoring over in Test history. Instead, he tucked a single off the next ball, and waited a few overs to resume his hitting.Four consecutive fours were crunched off Imran Khan, and then his third six off Yasir brought up the half-century. Misbah’s record was safe, but Yardley’s was gone. And so it seems only fitting to reflect on the remarkable feat of Yardley, an offspinner who could swing the bat. And it was remarkable – for his 29-ball half-century was scored by a No.8 batsman against the might of Andy Roberts, Joel Garner and Colin Croft in Barbados.It’s surprising the record stood for that long in an era where Adam Gilchrist got past fifty 43 times•AFPYardley entered the match having just had the spine of a Caribbean black sea urchin removed from his foot, and further pain was to come once he walked out to face the West Indies fast bowlers. This was the match in which Graham Yallop became the first person to wear a full protective helmet in Test cricket, but Yardley wasn’t wearing one.”Kensington Oval reminded him of home at the WACA, where anything short tended to clear the stumps and rewarded the slasher,” Gideon Haigh wrote of Yardley in . So he slashed, and cut Garner for six over deep point, also copping blows to the elbow, throat and toe. “When I got hit in the elbow I thought my whole arm was gone,” Yardley recalled in Haigh’s book, “and I can’t have been thinking too straight because the next ball I tried to hook. It hit me in the throat.”Along the way, Yardley lost a few batting partners – Steve Rixon, Jeff Thomson and Wayne Clark all fell to the bowling of Garner. But the No.11, Jim Higgs, one of the more renowned bunnies in Australia’s recent Test history, defended staunchly and survived for long enough – 27 minutes, in fact – for Yardley to bring up his half-century by hooking a bouncer for another six.”I can still remember the innings,” Higgs recalled to ESPNcricinfo today. “It was scary in terms of some of the shots he played, but it was also scary from the point of view of the bowlers. I blocked and blocked and blocked…and he was trying to hit Croft over cover and they were going over backward point, one bounce. It was like a high-pressure, get-them-before-they-get-me type of innings from him. I remember it being full of adrenaline.”The one thing, though, that the Australians did not know at the time was that Yardley had scored the fastest Test fifty by an Australian. In fact, at the time it was the second-quickest in all of Test history, behind only a 28-ball effort from West Indian Foffie Williams in 1948 – at the same ground, Kensington Oval.”I must say I never knew that was the record,” Higgs said. “And we didn’t at the time, over there. No one made any comment about it.”How times have changed. Between commentary, social media and the scoreboard at the ground, when Warner slogged his six off Yasir, it was impossible not to know that it was Test cricket’s second-fastest fifty. But it was a very, very different innings from that played by Yardley.