Starc Becomes the World Test Championship's Leading Wicket-Taker
Six for 12 from ten overs at Mackay took Mitchell Starc past Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon to the top of the World Test Championship wicket list.
Mitchell Starc is now the leading wicket-taker in the history of the World Test Championship, having taken six for 12 from ten overs against Bangladesh at the Great Barrier Reef Arena in Mackay.
The spell
Six of his ten overs were maidens. His first five wickets came inside 22 balls, and Bangladesh lost their opening five wickets for 12 runs on the way to being dismissed for 64.
Figures of six for 12 are remarkable in isolation. What makes them harder to place is the shape of them: a new-ball spell that removed the top half of a Test side before the innings had properly begun, in conditions where his opposite number later took seven wickets of his own.
The record
Starc now has 230 wickets in the World Test Championship from 56 matches. He passes Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon, who are level on 225, which is why some accounts name one and some the other. Both are correct, because he went past the pair of them in the same spell.
The list at the top now reads Starc 230, Cummins 225, Lyon 225, Ravichandran Ashwin 195, Jasprit Bumrah 185.
In the current 2025-27 cycle he leads with 54 wickets from ten Tests, with Josh Tongue of England next on 53. Tongue arrived at that figure the same week, taking eight in the match against Pakistan at Headingley.
And a second milestone in the same innings
His fifth wicket of the innings took his overall Test tally past Dale Steyn's 439. He finished the innings on 441.
Two of those markers passed in one spell is the sort of thing that reads like a statistical coincidence, and mostly it is. But it also says something about longevity in a format that has been unkind to fast bowlers: Starc has been taking Test wickets since 2011, and he is still the one being handed the new ball when a match needs breaking open.
What it does not settle
Wicket totals reward availability as much as they reward quality, and the World Test Championship is only seven years old, so its all-time list is a record of who has played through a particular window rather than a ranking of the best bowlers to have played the format. Cummins has captained through much of the same period, which changes both workload and role.
The number is real. The argument it is used to settle is not one the number can settle.
If you want the wider context, our Test wickets piece sets out what we hold and, importantly, what we do not.