The innings that defined Dean Jones

Dean Jones after his double century in the searing heat of Chennai in 1986

It wouldn’t happen now. Not in 40C heat with the batsman urinating involuntarily, vomiting and suffering from heat stroke and exhaustion. In the searing heat of Chennai, Dean Jones was done for but was goaded into continuing: if you can’t handle it, he was told memorably by his captain, Allan Border, we’ll get a Queenslander out here who can. These days, wary of the potential for litigation, the medics would win the day.

Unlike Border, a Queenslander, Jones was a Victorian and proudly so. The Test match in question, between India and Australia at Chennai in September 1986, was only the third of Jones’s career after two earlier efforts in the Caribbean in 1984, but it would prove to be the one he would be remembered for as well as one of the most memorable of all time.

It finished in a dramatic tie — only the second Test in the history of the game to do so — and Jones’s double hundred in the first innings would be celebrated as one of the most courageous and inspirational performances in Australian history. Having prodded Jones into action time and again, Border came to look upon him as one of his most valuable lieutenants, an instrumental part of a team that would go on to win the World Cup and the Ashes, and cement Border’s reputation as a transformative captain.

Jones was eventually dismissed for 210 — from 330 balls in eight hours and 22 minutes — in the most extreme conditions imaginable, exhausted to the point where, later in his life, he would say that he could not remember anything about the last hundred runs he made.

The innings concluded with Jones being taken to hospital to be put on saline drip, suffering as he was from dehydration.

He was held in high affection in India because of that performance and because he was part of Australia’s World Cup-winning side of 1987, the first to be held in the subcontinent, and it was in Mumbai, India, where Jones died unexpectedly, aged 59, having suffered a sudden heart attack.

Jones was a superb batsman for Victoria and Australia, a hard-running, hard-hitting middle order dasher and a key part of Border’s team that helped bring some respect back to Australian cricket after some lean years.

He played 52 Tests (not as many as he ought to have played, if truth be told) and 164 one-day internationals, and with an average in each format of the game in the mid-40s, he can be justifiably seen as a batsman of high rank. As well as a World Cup winner, Jones played in two Ashes-winning teams. Australians (and especially Melburnians) loved the swagger with which he played the game.

Often eschewing a helmet against the quicker bowlers (occasionally riling them as he did when he once asked Curtly Ambrose, the great West Indies fast bowler, to remove a sweatband), proudly wearing his baggy green cap and chewing gum ferociously, Jones’s attitude rubbed off on his teammates and helped pave the way for the all-conquering team that would follow, the strength of which, ironically, came to limit his opportunities.

Jones in 1986.

Instead, he went on to play for Durham at the beginning of its journey in first-class cricket and then Derbyshire, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the activities of both counties, as he did wherever the game took him. He coached and commentated widely and had tremendous enthusiasm for all aspects of the game.

Jones made 11 Test hundreds, the most memorable of which was his first in the tied Chennai Test. Beforehand, he wasn’t even sure whether or not he was going to play in that game, rooming as he was with the Western Australia batsman Mike Veletta, who was gunning for the same place in the team.

Jones’s reputation for quicksilver footwork against the spinners won the day and he went on to play one of the most significant innings in the history of the game.

The Times