John Minshull
107
Duke of Dorset’s XI v Wrotham
The Vine, Sevenoaks
August 1769
On 31 August 1769, John Minshull, or was it Minchin, playing for Sevenoaks, or was it the Duke of Dorset’s XI, made cricket’s first ever hundred – or maybe he didn’t. Perhaps John Small had scored one the season before, but didn’t have the good fortune for anyone to write it down.
Cricket’s misty past offers only partial answers. Minshull’s hundred was at very least the first one recorded and if that twilit knock is hard to pin down, the player himself is easier to imagine. “A thickset man and about 5ft 9in in height,” he was born in Acton in 1741. By the summer of ’69 he was employed as head gardener at Knole House, seat of the Duke of Dorset, who was smitten enough with Minshull’s cricketing ability to pay him 20 guineas a year to work in the garden and, more importantly, appear for his team.
The match was played over two innings, Minshull appearing on the card as “Minchin” and top scoring in the first with 18. In 1769 that alone was a tally worth his 20 guineas, but in the second innings came something extraordinary. On a pitch kept trimmed by grazing sheep and without formal boundaries, Minshull hit 34 singles, 15 twos, nine threes and four all-run fours to make a score that would flatter an entire team.
The knock seems to have gone straight to Minshull’s head. John Nyren, writing in Cricketers of My Time, describes him as, “conceited as a wagtail and from constantly aping what he had no pretensions to, was, on that account only, not estimated according to the price at which he had rated his own merits”.
Now that doesn’t sound like any great batter worth their salt. Jon Hotten
Harmanpreet Kaur
171* (115 balls, 143 minutes, 20 fours, 7 sixes)
India v Australia, World Cup semi-final
County Ground, Derby
June 2017
Measurable consequences? Well, it got India to the World Cup final, at a packed Lord’s, a game that would be beamed live to a suddenly rapt Indian public, in turn freeing up much-needed funding and starting the gun for the Women’s Premier League. And usefully it showed that Australia could be beaten.
But much more than that, this was the innings: the perfect projection of what women’s batting could look like, the ceilings it could smash, the thrills it could offer, the jaw-dropping wrist work, the extraordinary Trumper-like backlift, the mad, inexplicable timing, the sheer balls of it all. Seven sixes. Harmanpreet went from her hundred to 171 in 25 balls, swatted with a regal air of stupendous entitlement. Her stage, her future. Every shot an invocation, screamed to the skies. “Do you get it now?! Good. So, open your mind, pay attention, and let’s see where this takes us …” Phil Walker
Alfred Mynn
125*
North v South
Barker’s Ground, Leicester
August 1836
A hulking all-rounder adored by the English public, Mynn understood the value of putting on a good show. His most memorable turn from a colourful career would have far-reaching consequences.
Struck on the ankle in the lead-up to a showdown between England’s premier cricketers, Mynn was targeted by Samuel Redgate, the North’s express quick, receiving numerous blows to the injured area. ‘The Lion of Kent’ met fire with fire, dispatching Redgate to all parts on his way to a heroic maiden first-class hundred.
Greeted by his captain as he left the field, there were gasps when Mynn removed his trousers. “A fearful sight met their eyes,” wrote David Frith in The Fast Men. “The leg, usually the size of Goliath’s, was grotesque from swelling and inflammation. It was unbelievable that a man could have stood on it, let alone batted – against Redgate – for five hours.”
Mynn’s enormous frame was hefted on to the roof of a stagecoach where he was taken to a London hospital for emergency treatment. Such was the severity of the injury that surgeons debated whether his leg would need to be amputated but Mynn eventually regained full use of the limb and returned to cricket two years later.
It’s believed that upon his return Mynn wore leg guards to protect against further injury, leading the way for the popularisation of batting pads in the mid 19th century as overarm became the dominant bowling style. Jo Harman
Enid Bakewell
113 (258 minutes, 4 fours)
Australia v England, 1st Test
Thebarton Oval, Adelaide
December 1968
A woman’s role in the 1960s was to stay at home all day and have dinner ready when their husband walked through the door, while the idea of a man changing a nappy was laughable. In fact, the official guidance for mothers at the time was that leaving their babies for any length of time was neglect.
Viewed through that lens, the decision by Enid Bakewell in 1968 to leave her three-year-old daughter in the care of her husband and travel 10,000 miles to go on a four-month tour of Australia and New Zealand was remarkable. It also proved revolutionary: women’s Test cricket had been a fixture for over three decades by the time Bakewell arrived in Australia, but the hundred which she hit on Test debut in Adelaide was the first ever scored by a mother.
The match ended in a draw, as did the series, but it marked the start of the career of one of England’s great all-rounders. Bakewell would go on to score two hundreds and six half-centuries on the 1968/69 tour, as well as taking nine five wicket-hauls with her off-spin, earning her a full-page feature in the 1970 edition of Wisden (the first woman to achieve the honour). Her husband apparently wrote to her during the tour to complain about being left holding the baby, but that didn’t stop Enid: five years later, by then a mother of three, she scored another brilliant hundred in the final of the first World Cup.
Bakewell’s achievements coincided with the onset of second-wave feminism; every run she scored and every wicket she took helped change the way society viewed the role of women. Enid Bakewell showed that mothers can be cricketers too. Raf Nicholson
Stan McCabe
187* (233 balls, 242 minutes, 25 fours)
Australia v England, 1st Test
SCG, Sydney
December 1932
A short while before Stan McCabe stepped out from behind the white picket gate to face the mob for the first time, he sought out his parents, seething in the pavilion, with an instruction. When it turns nasty, he told them, they were not allowed under any circumstances to jump the fence and punch the England captain.
Stan knew what was coming. They all did. It had been presaged in the press and the warm-up games. What’s more, with Bradman curiously unavailable for the first Test, he figured he’d be facing it on his own.
Day one, it’s all going off. The Hill, centre of a crowd 40,000-strong, is in fresh uproar. The top order’s been bounced and bombed and McCabe, the local boy, is going to cop it too. Jardine places six men on the leg-side and gives Larwood the nod. McCabe takes to moving back and across, going inside the line, eyeballing the leather.
Brendon McCullum
158* (73 balls, 10 fours, 13 sixes)
Royal Challengers Bangalore v Kolkata Knight Riders, IPL
M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru
April 2008
Nobody knew what to expect. A shiny new 20-over tournament in cricket’s biggest market. Would it be the start of a revolution or merely a star-studded hit and giggle? On opening night, Brendon McCullum made sure it felt like both.
The Kiwi smashed a devastating unbeaten 158, bringing up his half-century from 32 deliveries, his hundred from 53 and his 150 from 70, flaying Zaheer Khan, Jacques Kallis and the rest of a stunned RCB attack.
His strokeplay was violent, nine of his sixes coming over mid-wicket as he scored 128 runs in boundaries. But it was a paddle sweep off Zaheer over fine-leg that drove home just how in control he was, a deft touch in contrast to the carnage that surrounded it.
“I was pretty nervous at the start,” McCullum revealed post-match. “It was partly because of the hype around the game and some of the big names in the side with huge records. I guess you want to prove yourself and that adds to the nerves.”
The following day, Mike Hussey powered his way to the IPL’s second century as Chennai Super Kings amassed 240. The biggest show in town had arrived, and there would be no stopping it. Adam Hopkins
Graham Yallop
102 (307 balls, 347 minutes, 8 fours)
Australia v England, 1st Test
The Gabba, Brisbane
December 1978
The Bridgetown crowd were so appalled by yellow-bellied Yallop that he was booed to the crease when he became the first batter to wear a helmet in Test cricket on Australia’s ’78 tour. Faced with a spicy pitch and the fearsome trio of Roberts, Croft and Garner, the Aussie left-hander donned a modified motorcycle helmet, inspired by Dennis Amiss who had done the same a year earlier in World Series Cricket.
A week later Yallop unwisely removed his lid for a tour match in Guyana and promptly suffered a double fracture of the jaw after being smashed in the face by Croft. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
Handed the captaincy for the home Ashes later that year, Yallop became the second Australian to make a century in their maiden Test as skipper (after Greg Chappell) but, more significantly, the first player to make a Test hundred while wearing a helmet.
Head protection quickly became commonplace in the professional game and, as of 2023, it’s mandatory for batters to wear helmets when facing pace bowlers in international cricket. Jo Harman
You can read the full list of the 100 hundreds that changed the game in the latest issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly. Guardian readers can subscribe to the print magazine for just £3.67 per month and get their first issue for free. Click here for more details.
