Hobart, December 11 - Australian batsmen Adam Voges and Shaun Marsh put on a record breaking 449-run stand for the fourth wicket on the second day of the first cricket Test against the West Indies here on Friday.
The duo now has the sixth highest partnership of all time. Voges (269 not out) and Shaun (who holed out for 182 shortly before the lunchtime declaration) resumed their innings on Friday morning from where they had left at 438/3 which had already seen them stitching together a partnership of 317 runs, reports cricket.com.au.
But then they batted without much trouble at the start of second day, going past Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke’s 352 against Pakistan in 2010.
They then skipped Don Bradman and Bill Ponsford’s mark for the largest fourth-wicket stand for Australia, their 388 against England at Leeds in 1934.
They also left behind the Bradman-Sid Barnes partnership of 405 set against England in 1946-47 that had stood for almost seven decades as the biggest single stand for any wicket on Australian soil.
And then eclipsed Sri Lankan duo Mahela Jayawardene and Thilan Samaraweera’s all-time fourth-wicket record for all comers of 437, plundered against Pakistan in 2009.
It was also the heftiest partnership that any pair of Test batsmen has fashioned against the West Indies for any wicket in the collective of Caribbean nations’ 87-year Test cricket history.
And the total on which Smith eventually called time during the interval -- 583/4 declared -- is the biggest total Australia have amassed against the West Indies since the 605/9 they compiled on a lifeless deck in Bridgetown in 2003.