NRI cricketer tops age-old record

Varun broke a 109-year-old record to be the youngest batter scoring a ton in English County championship.

Indian-origin cricketer Varun Chopra broke a 109-year-old record to become the youngest batsman scoring a century for Essex in their second division County championship against Gloucestershire at Chelmsford.

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Chopra hit a knock of 106 from 162 balls on Thursday to erase the record of Arthur Jervois Turner who had played for Army against Cambridge University, two months before the Great War.

Chopra, who turns 19 next month, was born and raised in Ilford and coached both by Joe Hussain, Nasser Hussain's father and Graham Gooch.

Three years after his own precocious century in 1897, Turner, like a character from a ripping yarn, was thrice wounded in the Boer War and praised for his heroism by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.