England vs West Indies, 2020: 1st Test, Day 1 – End of Broad and Root’s streaks, Captaincy debut of Stokes and more stats

The resumption of professional cricket had to deal with rain as only 17.4 overs of play was possible during the first day of Southampton Test where England elected to bat first. In addition to the absence of their skipper Joe Root, the home team left out Stuart Broad to include both Jofra Archer and Mark Wood. Shannon Gabriel cleaned up Dominic Sibley before the hosts opened their account. England ended up on 35/1 with Rory Burns and Joe Denly scoring 20 and 14 respectively.

Here are all the statistical highlights from the first day’s play of the Southampton Test:

Stokes makes his captaincy debut:

5 – Ben Stokes became the 81st player to lead England in Test cricket. Stokes is only the 5th player to have made his Test captaincy debut for England without any experience of being a captain in first-class cricket.

Monty Bowden, Andrew Stoddart, Percy Chapman and Kevin Pietersen are the other four England captains who made their FC captaincy debut in a Test match. While the first three never appeared in any format other than FC cricket, Pietersen did lead England in an ODI prior to his FC/Test captaincy debut.

End of Broad and Root’s streaks:

51 – Stuart Broad went missing from an England’s home Test XI for the first time in 52 Test matches. He featured in 51 consecutive home Tests of England until this series after missing the 2012 Birmingham Test against West Indies. Only Sir Alastair Cook (89 Tests, 2006-2018) and Andrew Strauss (61 Tests, 2004-2012) featured in more consecutive home Tests of England than Broad. In fact, both the openers never missed a home Test match.

77 – This Test also brought an end to Joe Root’s streak of 77 consecutive appearances in Test cricket for England, a streak that began in 2014 home series. Only one player featured in more consecutive Test matches for England – Sir Alastair Cook in 159 games between 2006 and 2018.

This was also only the 2nd time Root missed a Test since his debut in December 2012 and the first at home. He also led England in all the 39 Tests since taking up as England captain in 2017 and prior to the current match.

A wicket to start:

3 – Only the 3rd time a wicket fell before the first run was recorded during a Test season in England. The other two instances were in 1888 (ENG-AUS, Lord’s) and 1999 (ENG-NZ, Birmingham) where England were the bowling side.

In fact, this was the 6th instance of England losing a wicket before posting their first run in a home Test season. (1890, 1909, 1971, 1976 and 1990)

1 – This is the first-ever Test series between England and West Indies that began with a wicket before the first run was scored. Overall, this was the 5th instance of an England-West Indies Test match starting with a wicket before the first run was recorded.

Test cricket returns after a break:

127 – The short first day’s play of England-West Indies Test match brought an end to Test cricket’s break of 127 days. This is the joint longest span without Test cricket since 1971-1972 period. In fact, the last year’s World Cup also caused a 127-day break to Test format. There was no Test cricket for as many as 175 consecutive days between August 1971 and February 1972.