Martin Crowe fell one run short of a triple century
In Wellington in 1991, New Zealand trailed Sri Lanka by 323 runs on first innings. Captain Martin Crowe batted for over ten hours and reached 299, the highest score ever by a New Zealander, before falling one run shy of 300. His stand of 467 with Andrew Jones was then the biggest partnership in Test history.
Crowe came from a cricketing family in Auckland: his father played first-class cricket, his older brother Jeff played Tests, and the actor Russell Crowe is a first cousin. He debuted for Auckland at 17 in 1980, top-scoring with 51, and was sent to spend six months on the ground staff at Lord's. He made his Test debut against Australia in February 1982, aged 19, younger than all but six New Zealanders before him.
By the mid-1980s he was being called one of the best young batsmen in the world, and Wisden named him a Cricketer of the Year in 1985. That year he made two scores of 188, one of them lasting 462 balls in the West Indies. In English county cricket with Somerset he averaged 59.46 in first-class matches, and in 1987 he finished third in the national averages behind his teammate Steve Waugh. His domestic best of 242 for Central Districts remains the highest score in New Zealand domestic cricket.
He captained New Zealand from 1990 to 1993, and his finest tournament came at the 1992 World Cup, co-hosted with Australia. He was top run-scorer with 456, opened with an unbeaten century in a win over Australia and was named player of the tournament as his side reached the semi-finals. When he retired in 1995, he held New Zealand's records for most runs in both Tests and one-day internationals.
Afterwards he stayed in the game as a writer and broadcaster, and he was among those pushing for a World Test Championship, an idea first floated in 2009 that finally started in 2019. He was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2012 and declared free of it the next year, but it returned in 2014, and he died in March 2016.
Source: Martin Crowe
