Much like it is a tradition for a footballer to take away the match ball after scoring a hat-trick, a bowler will pocket the cricket ball after claiming a five-wicket haul.<\/p>\n
But what happens if two bowlers take five-wicket hauls in the same innings?<\/p>\n
England seamers Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue came up with a solution after they snared five apiece on the opening day of the first Test against Pakistan.<\/p>\n
“Robbo said we can split the ball in half,” Tongue told Test Match Special. “The groundstaff have kindly done that.<\/p>\n
“It’s the first time I’ve seen that happen. I’m sure I’ll be putting that up somewhere.”<\/p>\n
Robinson showed off his half in a media conference and explained: “We were walking off the field.<\/p>\n
“Josh said it and I said: ‘We actually should do that, it would be quite cool.’<\/p>\n
“You don’t really have too many halves of a cricket ball, so it would be something that we never forget.”<\/p>\n
The efforts of the pace-bowling duo helped Joe Root get off to an ideal start on the first day of his second stint as England Test captain.<\/p>\n
Tongue claimed 5-46 and Robinson 5-51 to skittle Pakistan for 171 after England won the toss. The home side moved to 112-2 by the close in Leeds.<\/p>\n
Tongue and Robinson are the first pair of England bowlers to register five-wicket hauls in the same Test innings since Steve Harmison and Monty Panesar against Pakistan at Old Trafford in 2006.<\/p>\n
They led England off the field at Headingley hand in hand, hatching their plan to make one ball into two halves.<\/p>\n
“Wayne Bentley, the team manager, took it down to the groundstaff,” said Robinson.<\/p>\n
“I said: ‘Do you reckon they will be able to do it?’ Within five minutes he brought it back up and it was done. It’s really nice.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much like it is a tradition for a footballer to take away the match ball after scoring a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":743520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-743519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/743520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}