Successive home defeats, and the extras kings

Losing the home advantage
Over the past few years, West Indies have regularly struggled to compete overseas, but, till the drubbing by England in the first two Tests of the current series, they had consistently stretched some very good outfits in home series: Australia could only scrape a draw in the four-Test series in 1998-99, while South Africa managed a narrow 2-1 win in 2000-01; even in Australia's 3-1 win in the Caribbean last year, the West Indians showed some spunk, chasing down a record 418-run target in the fourth Test at Antigua. Now, it would appear, they are no longer a competitive outfit, even on home turf.

Since 1929-30, when they started playing at home, West Indies had, till the current series against England, never lost consecutive home Tests to any team other than Australia. Even the Australians had only managed the feat twice: in 1972-73, Ian Chappell led them to a 44-run win against Rohan Kanhai's side at Port-of-Spain, and then followed that with a more convincing ten-wicket victory at Georgetown to seal the series 2-0. More recently, Steve Waugh went one better, winning three Tests in a row before going down in that memorable encounter at Antigua.

There has been one other occasion of West Indies losing successive home Tests, though that didn't happen in the same series - England won by nine wickets in the last Test in 1953-54 to level the series 2-2; then, in the first Test of the next season nearly a year later, Australia beat them by the same margin. Michael Vaughan's team, though, has the opportunity to achieve what no team - not even the Australians - has managed so far: beat West Indies in every Test of a series in the Caribbean.

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The extras dilemma
Pakistan struggled to keep the extras in check in the one-day series against India - the 161 they conceded are the highest by any team in a bilateral one-day series. In fact, Pakistan also hold the record for the most number of extras conceded in a one-day tournament - that happened in the 1999 World Cup, when they leaked an amazing 306 of them in ten matches.

The 32.2 extras that Pakistan gave away per match against India isn't a record, though - that honour goes to West Indies, who generously gifted 37.7 per ODI on the way to a 0-3 defeat against England in the Texaco Trophy matches in 1991. Pakistan's effort against India comes in second place.

As the table below indicates, conceding extras by the dozens isn't a new disease in Pakistani cricket - out of the top eight instances of highest extras per match in a series or a tournament (in which a team played at least three ODIs), Pakistan figure in five of them. West Indies make the list twice while India have a solitary appearance, also in the 1999 World Cup.

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The Dravid-Tendulkar symphony
The one-day series would have given Pakistan enough indication of India's batting might, but here's a stat which wouldn't please Shoaib Akhtar and co.: Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar are the most productive third-wicket partnership in Test history. In 63 tries, the two have put together 3522 runs at an average of 58.70. Incredibly, they have scored almost twice the number of runs that the second-best pair has. On the averages front, though, there are others who have done better: Javed Miandad has combined superbly with both Mudassar Nazar and Shoaib Mohammad.