Test Cricket's Fastest Scorers: Brook and Duckett Hold the Ceiling
Aggressive Test batting is treated as a recent English invention. Our records say the fastest scorer of the era retired in 2013, and that the strike rate table is quietly ruined by tailenders unless you make it earn its place.
The idea that Test batting has recently been rewired to go faster is now so widely accepted that it barely gets checked. So we checked it, against every Test career in our own records.
The fastest scorer we hold played his last Test in 2013.
The list, with tailenders removed
Strike rate, runs per hundred balls, for batters with at least 60 innings in our data and a batting average above 35:
- Virender Sehwag, 88.2 (5,153 runs, average 45.2)
- Harry Brook, 86.8 (3,395 runs, average 53.9)
- Ben Duckett, 86.6 (3,320 runs, average 40.0)
- Rishabh Pant, 74.2 (3,476 runs, average 42.9)
- Quinton de Kock, 70.9 (average 38.8)
- Tillakaratne Dilshan, 70.6 (average 44.1)
- David Warner, 70.2 (8,786 runs, average 44.6)
- Sarfraz Ahmed, 70.2 (average 37.0)
Sehwag leads that list, and it is worth being exact about what the list is: these are figures from 2005 onwards, which is where our ball-by-ball records begin. His Tests from 2001 to 2004 are not in it, and they change the picture. Across his full career, 8,586 runs from 180 innings, his Test strike rate is 82.2, not 88.2. The rate our archive shows is the second half of his career, and it was his faster half.
Corrected for that, the order at the top changes: Brook at 86.8 and Duckett at 86.6 sit above Sehwag's full-career 82.2, and both are still playing.
Why the average filter matters more than it looks
Run that table without the batting average condition and it becomes nonsense. The raw strike rate list in our data is led by Sehwag at 88.2, then Brook and Duckett, then this:
- Tim Southee, 82.7, batting average 15.5
- Graeme Swann, 76.5, average 22.1
- Mohammed Shami, 74.6, average 11.9
- Mark Wood, 71.0, average 15.6
Southee would sit fourth on the unfiltered list. He is a number nine who scored at 82.7 because his job, on arrival, was to hit the ball as hard as possible before somebody got him out, and he did it 155 times.
That is not fast scoring in any sense a captain cares about. A strike rate is only interesting alongside how long the batter survives, and any list that ranks a tailender above a top order batter is measuring the batting order rather than the batting.
What Sehwag's number actually represents
An opener, facing the new ball, in an era with no requirement to do anything of the sort, scoring at 88 runs per hundred balls across 118 innings at an average of 45.
The average is the striking part. Scoring quickly is easy if you accept getting out; scoring at 88 while averaging 45 means the risk was priced correctly nearly every time. In our data only Brook, at 86.8 and an average of 53.9, has combined the two at anything like that level since.
Brook and Duckett, in context
England's pair are the genuine article rather than a marketing exercise. Brook at 86.8 with a 53.9 average is, by both measures at once, the most productive fast scorer in our records. Duckett at 86.6 and 40.0 is opening the batting the way Sehwag did.
What our data does not support is the claim that this represents a break with everything before it. It represents England, as a team, adopting an approach that individuals had used successfully for twenty years.
One name that will surprise nobody who watched him
Rishabh Pant, fourth on the filtered list, at 74.2 and an average of 42.9 across 86 innings. He was 27 not out at the close of the opening day at Galle this week, the day India finished on 288 for 2 after Devdutt Padikkal's maiden century.
A wicketkeeper scoring at three quarters of a run a ball while averaging 43 in Test cricket is its own kind of outlier, and it has been normalised because he has done it since his first season.
Coverage
Our Test records begin in 2005, so Sehwag's Tests from 2001 to 2004 are not included and his figures here cover the second half of his career. Careers that began before 2005 are cut off at that date throughout. Matches involving Afghanistan's men's team are withheld from the archive our Test records are built on and are absent.
A caveat that matters for any rate, and that we have stated too loosely elsewhere: where a career is cut off, a *count* can only come out smaller than the real figure, so the true number is always larger. A rate is different. It can move either way. Sehwag is the demonstration: our 2005 cut-off removed his slower early years and pushed his strike rate up by six points. Read every rate on this site as a rate over the matches we hold, not as a career figure.
The bottom line
Test cricket did get faster, and on the fullest figures available the ceiling moved with it. Sehwag's complete career strike rate of 82.2 is remarkable for an opener facing the new ball in an era that asked for nothing of the sort, and it is what made the approach thinkable. But the two highest sustained Test strike rates among batters with a substantial record now belong to Brook and Duckett, both mid-career. This is one of the rare cases where the modern claim holds up.
All figures computed by CricNerd from our own Test career records, 2005 onwards.