The Pakistani cricketer Hanif Mohammad, who has died aged 81, was a builder of monumental innings, both in terms of the number of runs he scored and the time he spent at the crease. For more than three decades he held the record for the highest individual score in first class cricket – 499 – and still standing is his record for the longest Test innings ever played, which lasted for a remarkable 16 hours and 10 minutes across four days.
His 499 came for Karachi against Bahawalpur in Pakistan in 1959, when he went past Don Bradman’s previous world best of 452 not out. Mohammad was run out attempting a risky second run to reach 500 before the end of the third day’s play and at first felt more annoyance at having missed out on that landmark than elation at his extraordinary feat. Still, it was an achievement that stood unsurpassed for 35 years until Brian Lara compiled 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham in 1994.
In 1958 Mohammad had set his epic record for the longest innings in Test history when he scored 337 in 970 minutes against West Indies in Barbados. He began batting towards the end of the third day of a six-day match with Pakistan in a hopeless position, following on with a first-innings deficit of 473. Playing ball by ball, never contemplating the end, and hardly daring to look at the scoreboard, he displayed a scarcely believable level of discipline to bat not only to the end of that tricky evening session but across three more gruelling days in the Caribbean sun before being caught behind the stumps towards the end of day six.
Thanks to Mohammad’s exhausting rearguard action, Pakistan were able to declare at 657 for 8 with just 11 overs remaining, and to engineer a famous draw. His innings was not only the longest in international cricket; it remains the highest score by any batsman in a Test match outside his own country.
Such feats made Mohammad the first star of Pakistan cricket and a leading figure in his home nation, where he did as much as anyone to inspire wider participation in a sport that had once been the preserve of a small sub-continental elite.
Born into a sporting family in Junagadh in Gujurat state, India, Hanif moved with his parents to Karachi to escape the internecine strife of partition at the age of 13. His mother, Ameer Bee, a national badminton champion, and his father, Ismail, a hotelier and accomplished club cricketer, had five sons, of whom Hanif was the third. Four of them – Hanif, Sadiq, Mushtaq and Wazir – eventually played cricket for Pakistan, while the other, Raees, also had a first class cricketing career.
Hanif, however, was the best of them, and by 17 had already made his international debut in Pakistan’s first Test match against India, in 1952. Even at an early age he was the finished article – so much so that when he first visited England in 1951 it was said that the respected coach Alf Gover sent him away, declaring there was nothing he could usefully do to improve his technique. A right-handed opening bat, standing at only 5ft 6ins, he had an immaculate defence and unrivalled intensity of concentration that saw him through many unflappable and defiant innings in his team’s cause.
The cricket writer Osman Samiuddin felt that the solitary nature of so many long, lonely vigils reflected something of Hanif’s character, suggesting that “although every one of his innings was played for a collective cause, each time he went out to bat was also a private occasion for him, a pursuit unto his own self: an inner meditation”. Wisden noted that after matches he preferred to return to his hotel to listen to tapes of sitar music rather than socialise with colleagues. Such self-containment inevitably led to accusations of aloofness, but it was probably truer that he preferred his own company, especially given the strains of his celebrity status.
He played 55 Tests between 1952 and 1969, scoring 3,915 runs at an average of 43.98 and captaining the side between 1964 and 1967. In all first class cricket he made 55 hundreds and had a career average of 52.32. An excellent cover fielder and useful occasional wicketkeeper, he also had the ability to bowl spin with either arm, occasionally switching from right to left in the same match or even in the same over. His first class span lasted until 1976, latterly with Pakistan International Airlines in domestic cricket. He then became a successful manager of the PIA team that won Pakistan’s one-day tournament, the Wills Cup, for three years in a row in the early 1980s, and was involved in the running of the club until the mid-90s.
For two decades he was also editor of the Cricketer magazine in Pakistan, which he had helped to set up in 1972. With his wife, Shamshad Begum, whom he married in 1960, he lived in a bungalow built on land that was gifted to him in gratitude for his 337 in the West Indies.
He is survived by Shamshad, their sons, Shoaib, who also played Test cricket for Pakistan, and Shahzeb, and by a daughter, Seema, and his four brothers.
• Hanif Mohammad, cricketer, born 21 December 1934; died 11 August 2016
