What 15 November Tells Us About Cricket

Several of the biggest performances on this date belong to the same fixture, not separate ones. The India v England Test of 2012 alone supplies Cheteshwar Pujara's 206, Alastair Cook's 176, Virender Sehwag's 117 off 117, Pragyan Ojha's 5/45 and Graeme Swann's 5/144, as well as two landmarks: Pujara's 500th Test run and Ravichandran Ashwin's 50th Test wicket. The 2000 Pakistan v England Test does something similar, pairing Mohammad Yousuf's 124 and Graham Thorpe's 118 with Saqlain Mushtaq's 8/164 and separate 500-run and 7000-run landmarks for Saqlain Mushtaq, Shahid Afridi and Mike Atherton. A single day's play can carry a whole match's worth of records.

Away from the headline Tests, this date has a habit of producing extremely tight finishes among the smaller nations. Denmark's 79 fell to Nepal's 80 in 2013, and in the same year United Arab Emirates' 88 was chased down by Uganda's 89. Oman and Bahrain managed only 134 and 139 between them in 2022. The pattern holds into other seasons too: Bangladesh 135 against Zimbabwe 136 ended with Zimbabwe winning by 3 wickets with 1 ball remaining in 2015, and Sri Lanka A's match with AFG A in 2025 finished the same way, AFG A winning by 3 wickets with 1 ball remaining.

The weight of the date has shifted with the format. Gundappa Viswanath's 137 in 1969 and Chris Gayle's 333 in 2010 sit at the Test end of the list, while newer entries are built for white-ball cricket: Tilak Varma's 120 off 47 for India against South Africa in 2024, and Virat Kohli's 117 off 113 alongside Mohammed Shami's 7/57 as Kohli reached his 50th ODI hundred in 2023. The WBBL turns up on this date across five separate seasons in the data, from 2020/21 to 2025/26, a sign that 15 November increasingly belongs to franchise cricket as much as to international fixtures.