I don't need to tell you that cricket loves an obscure statistic.

Or that a player who plays just his second Test aged 35 doesn't get many chances to set records that aren't related to age.

So when Chris Rogers opens Australia's innings on the second day of the ongoing first Ashes Test, it's telling that he will tilt at an all-time Test record, one that symbolises his international career.

How's this for obscure: if Rogers is out for between 50 and 99 in his innings tonight at Cardiff, he will set a new Test record for the number of dismissed half-centuries in consecutive innings.

He's been out for a half-century in his last six attempts, spanning three Tests against India in the last Australian summer. The feat doesn't seem that unlikely, but only Rahul Dravid has matched it, across four home Test matches against Sri Lanka and Australia in 1997 and 1998. No one has yet ascended to seven.

Plenty have made six consecutive scores of more than 50. Rogers is one of 25 on that list, among names of batting royalty like Barrington, Dexter, Sobers, Headley, Hendren, Hussey, Kallis, Walters, Abbas and Viswanath.

Above them are four players who've crossed 50 seven times in a row. Only last year Kumar Sangakkara did it on tours of Bangladesh and England. Shivnarine Chanderpaul in 2006/07 spanned tours from Karachi to London to Manchester to Durham to Port Elizabeth.

Andy Flower in 2000 went from Harare to Delhi to Nagpur before winding up back in Bulawayo in 2001, while Everton Weekes started against England in the Caribbean before making six of his scores on the 1948/49 tour of India.

Fine efforts all, but grandeur lifts them from the realm of this workmanlike record. Weekes' run includes five centuries on the trot, still a record in its own right. Flower had his unbeaten 232 and 183. Chanderpaul tonned up three times, Sangakkara made a triple and a couple of singles.

Even the players who've crossed 50 six times in a row have almost all gone on to centuries in some of those innings. It's an anomaly to have done otherwise. So we narrow our appraisal to those who topped 50 in those innings without getting over the hundred.

Four players boast six consecutive half-tons

There are only four of them. Former Australian captain Allan Border made 80, 65*, 76 and 51* to round out the 1989 Ashes, then 50 and 56 in his next two innings at home. Gloriously stubborn Pakistan captain Misbah-ul-Haq made 76*, 77 and 58* against South Africa at his neutral UAE base, then 62, 70, and a 99 that nearly ruined the sequence on his team's tour of New Zealand.

Former Australian captain Allan Border is one of six batsmen to have hit six consecutive half-centuries. ( Adrian Murrell/Allsport: Getty Images )

Not bad, but the not-out innings of both batsmen give the promise of more, a lack of closure.

This is a run of figures that can never be truly closed off. So we end up coming down to Dravid and Rogers, the only two whose statistical samples offer us completion.

Dravid made 92 in a rained out match against Sri Lanka in Nagpur, then 93 and 85 in a high-scoring draw against Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan in Mumbai.

Three months later he faced Mark Taylor's Australians, producing 52, 56 and 86 against not entirely terrifying bowlers like Gavin Robertson, Paul Reiffel, Michael Kasprowicz, Blocker Wilson and Greg Blewett.

Rogers bagged a perfect brace of 55 and 55 in Brisbane in December 2014, followed by 57 and 69 in Melbourne, then an outlying 95 in Sydney before getting back to his roots with 56.

Even Dravid's run is disrupted by poignancy: with so many near-centuries, the sequence hints at disappointment rather than satisfaction.

What makes Rogers' run so satisfying is the consistency: he has one near miss, but the rest are supremely solid half-centuries. If the game's yardstick is for batsmen to average 50, shouldn't the perfect batsman make 50 every time they walk to the middle?

If Rogers did join the select club who've passed 50 seven times in a row, he'd do so with absurd modesty: the tasteful California bungalow next to David Warner's Geordie Shore mansion. He could even be the first to pass a half-century eight times in a row. If he really wants to spoil the symmetry with a century, that would be a good moment to choose.

An appreciation of the absurd aside, you have to respect the way that Rogers has come into the team late in his career and worked so assiduously.

He's known dominance in first-class cricket, orchestrating massive run chases or scoring fast declaration runs, but in Tests he's been willing to be the wallpaper man. The chance to set such an understated but nonetheless rarefied record would be a fair reflection of his effort.