New Zealand’s superior statistics in their 18-game winning run do not deter England’s Eddie Jones from insisting his team aspire to end up as world No1
Back in the early 1980s, there were few more futile things a man could do than try to pursue a career in competitive squash. Because to be the best, you had to beat Jahangir Khan. And between April 1981 and November 1986 Khan won so many consecutive matches that even statisticians lost track of the exact count. Most figure it was around 555, making it the longest winning streak in the history of sport. “It wasn’t my plan to create such a record,” Khan once said. “All I did was put in the effort to win every match I played and it went on for weeks, months and years.” Khan’s rival Ross Norman once admitted that it got so deflating that everyone else just “accepted the inevitable”. The best strategy, Norman reckoned, was to wait. “One day Jahangir will be slightly off his game,” he told himself, “and I will get him.”
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