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Next to Gavaskar

Top Test scores by Indian openers against England ESPNcricinfo Ltd

9 Batsmen who have been dismissed for 199 in Tests - KL Rahul became the second Indian in this list, after Mohammad Azharuddin, who fell for 199 against Sri Lanka in Kanpur 30 years ago. In all there have been 11 instances of batsmen scoring 199 in Tests, including two occasions when batsmen were not out at that score.

1 Indian opener who has scored more runs in a Test innings against England than Rahul's 199: Sunil Gavaskar made 221 at The Oval in 1979, which remains the only double-hundred by an Indian opener versus England. One more run would have made Rahul the eighth Indian to score a double-century against England, and the ninth to get one in Chennai. He would have been the first opener to score a double against England since Graeme Smith in 2003.

161 The partnership between Rahul and Karun Nair; there have only been four higher stands for India's fourth wicket against England, and only one of those was in India: in 1985, Mohammad Azharuddin and Mohinder Amarnath added 190, also at the MA Chidambaram Stadium.

31 Innings between century stands for India's opening pairs in Tests. The last hundred partnership - before the 152-run stand today between Rahul and Parthiv Patel - came in Fatullah in June 2015, when M Vijay and Shikhar Dhawan added 283. Between that Test and this one, India's opening pairs had scored only 717 partnership runs in 31 innings at an average of 24.72.

4 Test hundreds for Rahul, the most by an Indian opener since the start of 2015. He has four hundreds in 17 innings, compared to Vijay's three in 26 and Dhawan's two in 16 during this period.

12 Instances of both Indian openers passing 50 in a Test innings against England. The last such instance was also in Chennai, in 2008, when Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir both went past 50 in India's fourth-innings chase of 387.

6 Indian opening pairs who have put together century stands in their first partnership. The latest to join this group was Rahul-Parthiv, who had 152 in their opening stand together. The others to achieve this are Dhawan-Vijay, Dinesh Karthik-Wasim Jaffer, Virender Sehwag-Rahul Dravid, Arun Lal-Sunil Gavaskar, and Farokh Engineer-Ashok Mankad.

71 Parthiv's score, the highest of his six 50-plus knocks in Tests; his other such scores are 69, 67*, 62*, 62 and 54.