Test cricket will hit the 2,000-game mark on Thursday. Benedict has the best stats from the previous 1,999...
Benedict has the best stats from the five-day game's history
England's clash with India at Lord's will be the 2,000th Test match ever played.
Since the maiden game was contested in 1877, Test cricket has given us plenty to remember such as the Bodyline tour of 1932/33, Ian Botham's Headingley heroics in 1981, and dominant periods for both West Indies and Australia.
Sky Sports' Benedict Bermange has been rifling through his scrapbook to find the best stats from the five-day game's history. Read on to see what he found out...
The 1,999 Tests so far have seen 1,959,659 runs, 61,175 wickets, 3,450 centuries and 7,554 ducks. There have been 30,036 byes, 41,386 leg-byes, 6,365 wides and 37,256 no-balls.
Only two Tests have been tied - Australia against the West Indies at Brisbane in 1960, and India against Australia at Chennai in 1986.
The 1000th Test was played at Hyderabad in November 1984 between Pakistan and New Zealand. Javed Miandad scored a century in each innings as the home side triumphed by seven wickets.
The oldest side take the field in a Test was England's at Kingston in April 1930. With an average age of 37 years 188 days, they racked up 849 in their first innings, thanks to Andy Sandham's 325.
The youngest was a recent Zimbabwean side who faced Bangladesh at Dhaka in January 2005 with an average age was just 21 years 22 days.
The Indian side who squared up to Australia at Bengaluru in October 2008 had a total of 861 Test caps between them - the highest ever.
Sachin Tendulkar may have scored the most Test runs and centuries, but it is his Indian team-mate Rahul Dravid who has batted for the longest (more than 665 hours) and faced the most deliveries (29,125) in Test history.
Shahid Afridi, Virender Sehwag and Adam Gilchrist have all scored their Test runs at strike rates of greater than 80 runs per hundred balls faced. However, in terms of runs per hour, the fastest is still England's Maurice Tate, who took advantage of the swifter over-rates in earlier years to score his runs at 44 runs per hour.
Australia are the only team to have won more away Tests than they have lost (124 to 98).
One-sided
The most one-sided century partnership in Test history occurred at Faisalabad in 2004, when Sanath Jayasuriya and Dilhara Fernando added 102 for Sri Lanka's ninth wicket against Pakistan. Jayasuriya outscored his partner 88 runs to one.
In the course of his innings of 333 against Sri Lanka at Galle in October 2010, Chris Gayle scored 143 of his runs from the bowling of Suraj Randiv, the most runs by one batsman from one bowler in a Test innings.
Muttiah Muralitharan may have taken the most Test wickets - 800 of them - but he has also recorded the most golden ducks - 14 - four more than Courtney Walsh.
On both 15 November 2010 and 30 August 2001 five batsmen scored Test centuries, the most ever on a single day. The most runs on a single day of Test cricket is 1,086 which were scored on 28 December 2001.
Sachin Tendulkar - among all his other records - is the only player to score Test centuries more than twenty years apart. Don Bradman's first and last three-figure scores came 19 years 7 months apart.
Australia have not lost any of their last 22 Tests against all-comers at the Gabba in Brisbane. The all-time record is Pakistan's 34-match unbeaten run at the National Stadium, Karachi between 1955 and 2000.
In his innings of 307 at Melbourne, Bob Cowper hit a Test-record 26 threes, helped by long boundaries and a slow outfield. That innings was both preceded and followed by ducks, the highest such score to be so.
In the Durban Test of January 1957, South African off-spinner Hugh Tayfield bowled a record 137 dot balls in a row against England, which remains a Test record to this day.
