page_title: Norm O'Neill
section_title: Career peak
hierarchical_section_title: Norm O'Neill / Career peak
caption_attribution_description: English: Test batting chart of Norm O'Neill. Red columns are the runs in the innings. Blue dots indicate not outs. Blue line is average in the last ten innings. Thanks to Raven4x4x for providing the template.
context_page_description: Norman Clifford Louis O'Neill OAM was a cricketer who played for New South Wales and Australia. A right-handed batsman known for his back foot strokeplay, O'Neill made his state debut aged 18, before progressing to Test selection aged 21 in late 1958. Early in his career, O'Neill was one of the foremost batsmen in the Australian team, scoring three Test centuries and topping the run scoring aggregates on a 1959–60 tour of the Indian subcontinent which helped Australia win its last Test and series on Pakistani soil for 39 years, as well as another series in India. His career peaked in 1960–61 when he scored 181 in the Tied Test against the West Indies, and at the end of the series, had a career average of 58.25.
  O'Neill's performances on the 1961 tour of England saw him named as one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year. Thereafter his form was less formidable, characterised by nervousness and fidgeting at the start of his innings. Persistent knee problems as well as a controversial media attack on the legality of West Indian bowler Charlie Griffith saw him dropped from the Australian team after 1965.
context_section_description: The following season O'Neill was Australia's leading batsman during the 1959–60 tour to Pakistan and India, where he was a part of the last Australian team to win a Test on Pakistani soil for 39 years. After a quiet match in the First Test eight-wicket win in Dacca in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), in which he scored two and 26 not out, O'Neill played a key role in the victory in the Second Test in Lahore that was to Australia's last in Pakistan until 1998. O'Neill made his maiden Test century of 134 in the first innings to give Australia a 245-run lead. He then took his maiden Test wicket in Pakistan's second innings, that of Shujauddin. This left Australia chasing a target of 122 in the last two hours on the final day. The chase was on schedule with O'Neill partnering Neil Harvey when the Pakistanis began wasting time to prevent an Australian victory. This was implemented by swapping fielders very slowly when the left and rightt-handed combination of Harvey and O'Neill took a single, and overs began taking seven minutes instead of three. To counter this, Harvey deliberately backed away when a ball was aimed at the stumps and threw away his wicket by letting himself be bowled for 37. This allowed Benaud to come in and bat with O'Neill so that the two rightt-handed batsmen would give no opportunity to waste time by switching the field. Benaud then threatened Pakistani captain Imtiaz Ahmed with a formal complaint over the time-wasting, and proceesings returned to their normal pace. Australia made the target with a few minutes to spare, with O'Neill on 43. O'Neill failed to make double figures in the final Test, which was drawn, but ended the series with 218 runs at 72.66. In another tour match, against the President's XI, O'Neill scored an unbeaten 52 in a low-scoring match as Australia stumbled to their target of 116 with only three wickets in hand.
  O'Neill's performances in Pakistan was such that the parents in one cricket-following Karachi family named their new son Anil for its resemblance to O'Neill. Anil Dalpat went on to become the first Hindu to represent Pakistan, playing nine Tests in the 1980s as a wicketkeeper.
  On the five-Test Indian series which followed, O'Neill started slowly, aggregating 60 runs in the first two Tests, which were shared 1–1. He returned to form with a leg-side dominated 163 in a high-scoring draw in the Third Test at Brabourne Stadium in Bombay. After scoring 40 in an innings victory in the Fourth Test in Madras, Australia needed a draw in the Fifth Test in Calcutta with four players injured or ill, while Benaud had a dislocated spinning finger. O'Neill scored 113 in the first innings to help a depleted team take a 137-run first innings lead and prevent India from squaring the series. He was Australia's leading scorer in the Tests, with 376 runs at 62.66. He also made his highest first-class score of 284, against an Indian President's XI in Ahmedabad. He was the top scorer for the whole subcontinental Test tour, with 594 runs in eight matches at 66.00.
  He returned to Australia and played in one match for New South Wales at the end of the 1959–60 season, scoring 175 as his state defeated Western Australia and won a seventh Shield in a row. Prior to the following Australian summer, O'Neill was part of an International Cavaliers team that toured South Africa. He scored 133 runs at 21.83.
  In the lead-up to the 1960–61 home Tests series against the West Indies, O'Neill scored 156 not to set up an innings win for his state over the tourists. He then struck 181 in the first innings of the opening match at Brisbane, his highest Test score. The innings prompted teammate Bob Simpson to say "if God gave me an hour to watch someone I'd seen, I'd request to see Norman O'Neill. He had the style." Australia took a first innings lead and O'Neill made 26 in the second innings as Australia collapsed towards a likely defeat before recovering; the match ended in the first Tied Test in history. This was the peak of O'Neill's career. Having played 14 Tests, he was averaging 67.68 with the bat.
  He then struck 
caption: O'Neill's Test career batting performance. The red bars indicate the runs that he scored in an innings, with the blue line indicating the batting average in his last ten innings. The blue dots indicate an innings where he remained not out.[16]
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