The hundred club: how cricketers feel when they hit their first Test century

What puts a smile on your face and makes you feel a little warm, fuzzy and romantic while watching cricket? It might be the sight of your favourite player in full flow, or taking in a particular skill – a leggie ragging it square or a quick delivering a perfect yorker. For me, it’s simple: watching someone hit their first Test hundred.

You’re observing a player live out their dream and enter into an exclusive club. Once they have hit one, there’s no guarantee of more to come, but they will always be a Test centurion. There’s cold, hard proof they belonged at the highest level, even if only for a short time. When the helmet comes off and they raise their bat, the TV cameras scanning their beaming teammates, a proud parent or partner, it’s a reminder that this moment has been in the making for far longer than a few hours. It doesn’t matter who it’s for, who it’s against, when or where it happened – it’s a soul-stirring feat.

“Itchanged my whole life,” says former Pakistan all-rounder Azhar Mahmood, reflecting on a surreal Test debut in October 1997. In the first innings of the match, against a South Africa attack that included Donald and Pollock, the 22-year-old Mahmood reeled off an unbeaten 128. The fairytale did not stop there. He was batting at eight, it was his first hundred in first-class cricket, in his 44thmatch, and made in Rawalpindi, the city of his birth.

“It was my first hundred but I wasn’t surprised with the performance,” says Mahmood. Hehad developed his batting on a Pakistan A tour of England earlier that year, scoring a first-class best of 92. His ability, combined with the liberty to freewheel alongside the tail, set him on the right path. “My approach was always to be positive. We were seven, eight down