Aussie rules cricket: Team before individual

When David Warner was feasting on the Pakistan attack at the Adelaide Oval on Saturday, it seemed that quite a few records were under threat.
SCORECARD
Don Bradman's 334 (matched by Mark Taylor, also versus Pak, in Peshawar 1998), a mark considered sacrosanct in Australian cricket, Matthew Hayden's 380 against Zimbabwe and of course, Brian Lara's 400 v England.

Instead it proved an ultimate case of putting team before individual by the Aussie team management when they declared midway into the fifth session of the match against a team which is finding it difficult to even last two sessions in each innings.It emerged later that there is rain threat on Sunday and Monday and that prompted Tim Paine to take the call, but most would have expected the captain to give Warner at least one more hour to chase the records.
It should be noted that Lara needed seven sessions to score 400 against England in St John's Antigua in 2004, while Taylor needed a good six sessions to reach 334 and then chose to stop at Bradman's mark as a sign of respect.
In doing so, Taylor was also putting off going after the then Test record of 375 by Lara. His act of putting the team cause first came in for a lot of praise, but in Adelaide on Saturday, the former Australia captain too felt Australia could have allowed Warner to go for the records.
ATOP MOUNT 334: Mark Taylor beneath the Peshawar scoreboard after his epic triple in 1998. (Getty Images)
"I reckon they probably could have, to be totally honest...There was still three days and a session and a bit left," Taylor, commentating for Macquarie Sports Radio, told local media said at the end of day's play on Saturday. "The way Davey was scoring they probably only needed to give him another hour to bat. I think without really harming their chances they could have," he added.
But Taylor made it clear that he wasn't against putting team before individual records first. "The good thing is it's about winning first. Go win individual records, but they're not what you should play for. Cricket is a stats-based game so we talk about individual scores and bowling analysis and that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, it's about winning and losing the game," he told a section of the Australian media.
While the Aussies on Saturday did allow Warner the time to go past Bradman's mark, Taylor hadn't given himself that. But the left-hander clarified that it wasn't necessarily to stay on par with Bradman in the record books.
"(Being at 334) at stumps, I had time to think about what to do. I thought about batting on only because I wanted to put them back out in the field for a third day in Peshawar. But that's when the score came into it. I didn't want people to assume I went out to bat just to pass Bradman's score. It would have been what I thought was best for us to win the game of cricket. As it turned out we had a draw," he said.