663 Wickets, and the Bowler Who Takes Them Fastest Is Not on the Podium

Josh Hazlewood went past 300 Test wickets in Darwin this week, in a Test his side spent the first three days losing control of. Milestones have a habit of arriving at inconvenient moments.

It sent us to our own records to ask a question that sounds simple and is not: who are the great Test bowlers of this era, and by which measure?

We hold career records for 983 male Test cricketers. Here is what they say.

The volume list

Wickets taken, in our data:

1. James Anderson, 663 from 175 matches
2. Stuart Broad, 604 from 167
3. Nathan Lyon, 567 from 141
4. Ravichandran Ashwin, 532 from 105
5. Mitchell Starc, 433 from 105
6. Dale Steyn, 431 from 90
7. Rangana Herath, 404 from 82
8. Tim Southee, 391 from 107
9. Ravindra Jadeja, 342 from 88
10. Kagiso Rabada, 340 from 73

Two Englishmen at the top, which is what happens when two bowlers open together for fifteen years and both stay fit.

Now the measure almost nobody quotes

Volume rewards longevity. It tells you who kept turning up, which is a real virtue, but it does not tell you how dangerous a bowler was in any given spell.

For that, use strike rate: how many balls a bowler needs, on average, per wicket. It answers the question a captain actually asks, which is how long until this man gets me a breakthrough.

Balls per wicket, among the leading wicket takers in our data:

• Kagiso Rabada: 39.5
• Dale Steyn: 41.8
• Pat Cummins: 45.7
• Mitchell Starc: 46.2
• Ravichandran Ashwin: 51.0
• Stuart Broad: 55.8
• James Anderson: 57.0
• Rangana Herath: 58.3
• Ravindra Jadeja: 59.0
• Tim Southee: 60.1
• Nathan Lyon: 61.4

Rabada strikes every 39.5 balls. Anderson, who has nearly twice as many wickets, strikes every 57.

That is a difference of about three overs per wicket. Across a single innings in which a bowler sends down 20 overs, the gap is worth roughly one extra wicket, every innings, for a career.

Both things are true, and that is the point

None of this diminishes Anderson. Taking 663 wickets requires being good for long enough that the number becomes possible at all, and almost nobody manages it. Longevity is a skill, and it is the rarer one.

But if you were picking a bowler to take one wicket in the next hour on a flat pitch, our data says you would not pick from the top of the volume list. Rabada averages 22.0 with the ball and strikes faster than anyone with a comparable haul. Steyn, at 22.4 and 41.8, was the same bowler a generation earlier.

The three fastest strikers in this group are all genuinely quick. The three slowest, Southee, Jadeja and Lyon, include two spinners whose job description is partly to hold an end. Strike rate rewards the bowler asked to attack, and it should be read knowing that.

The averages, for completeness

Runs conceded per wicket, in our data: Rabada 22.0, Cummins 22.1, Steyn 22.4, Ashwin 24.1, Jadeja 25.5, Anderson 26.1, Starc 26.5, Herath 27.1, Broad 27.7, Lyon 30.2, Southee 30.3.

The averages are tightly bunched, between about 22 and 30, which tells you these are all outstanding bowlers and the debate between them is one of shading rather than class.

What our data covers, and what it does not

Our Test records begin in 2005. Anderson debuted in 2003 and Steyn in 2004, so both lose their earliest Tests here, and every figure above is a figure in our data rather than a complete career record.

Two different things follow from that, and they are worth separating. A count, like wickets taken, can only be short: the real career number is larger, never smaller. An average, like the runs per wicket above, is a rate, and a rate can move either way once the missing matches are added back. Anderson's first two seasons could have improved his career average or worsened it. So read the counts here as floors and the averages strictly as averages over the matches we hold.

Matches involving Afghanistan's men's team are withheld from the public archive our Test records are built on and are therefore absent throughout.

The bottom line

Anderson took the most. Rabada makes you wait the least. Those are different achievements, they belong to different bowlers, and a sport that only ever counts to the biggest number keeps missing the second one.

All figures computed by CricNerd from our own Test career records, 2005 onwards.