The left-hander’s white-ball form at the top of the order continues to be spectacular and he’s increasingly at the centre of the major Test debate

Matt Roller19-Sep-2024As Travis Head placed his helmet on top of his bat handle and raised both to the sky in the style of Chris Gayle, it prompted a tantalising thought. Opening the batting against England in this ODI in Nottingham, Head cruised to his hundred in the 30th over: what is to stop him doing the same thing for Australia in the first session of a Test against India later this year?There is a growing sense that Steven Smith will return to the middle order when India arrive in Australia for a five-match series, with Andrew McDonald admitting last week that conversations have taken place. There has been a clear indication from McDonald that Australia will continue with the same six batters, meaning that Smith sliding down to No. 4 would require someone else to shift up.Related

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Usman Khawaja, the only incumbent, has made his own view clear. “I feel like Travis Head might be best suited,” he said last week. “He’s obviously been very successful opening the batting in one-day cricket… The confidence transfers over. When you’re seeing the ball well, scoring lots of runs and not much is going through your head, it’s a great place to be.”Perhaps that is to underplay the difference between the formats. Head was facing two white balls on Thursday night rather than one red one, at a ground with boundaries that are barely half as big as those at Australia’s home grounds. There are no fielding restrictions in a Test match, and India’s attack is a clear upgrade on the one England put out in Nottingham.Yet there were signs in this innings of the traits required of a Test opener – as there have been throughout his remarkable last 12 months as a white-ball dasher. His return to fitness at last year’s World Cup had a transformative effect on Australia’s campaign, culminating in his crowd-silencing 137 against India in their six-wicket win in the final.Head faced two balls early in his innings from Jofra Archer which were borderline unplayable, angling in from around the wicket then shaping away late off the seam to beat the bat. He was also dropped on 6, with Brydon Carse 20 yards off the backward point boundary and failing to cling onto an acrobatic effort as he leapt back over his head.But Head has a remarkable ability to put the last ball out of his mind, as he demonstrated with the series of plays-and-misses against Jasprit Bumrah in Ahmedabad which still play on the minds of Indian supporters. At Trent Bridge, he cruised to a run-a-ball half-century and gradually accelerated towards the finish line, reaching a 92-ball hundred and then a 123-ball 150.Travis Head on Jofra Archer: ‘Jof’s way too good for me’•AFP/Getty Images”It was difficult at the start,” Head said. “Jof’s way too good for me, so I’ve experienced it a few times. I even thought in the T20s, the couple of overs I faced him in Southampton, he’s an exceptionally good bowler. You’ve got to take the good with the bad… there wasn’t much in those first couple of overs, so I just tried to back my technique and tried to stay out there.”England have found Head incredibly difficult to close down over the past 10 days: his 90 runs in the T20I series came off just 37 balls, and he has been merciless against any width. It is his unorthodox technique which presents the challenge: “Sometimes ‘width’ is even middle-and-off stump for him, because he creates that room so well,” Marcus Trescothick, England’s coach, explained.Head has gone through phases of looking vulnerable to the short ball, and England hardly used the bouncer against him on Thursday night: “We’re trying desperately,” Trescothick said. “Eventually, the worm will turn.” If he were to open in Tests, there is no doubt that India would bombard him with short balls at some stage – particularly with no fielding restrictions to worry about.The biggest potential obstacle is Head himself. He has previously distanced himself from the role, suggesting that he should only be considered to open in the subcontinent – having done so five times in India at the start of last year – and was cagey when asked about the prospect of shifting up the order in the aftermath of Australia’s win in Nottingham.”Yes,” he said, when asked if he was aware of the speculation in the media at home. “Keep the chatter: it makes it interesting.” After spending three hours on the attack, he played with a dead bat when asked if his stance had shifted since he appeared to rule himself out of contention: “I’m not going to dive into that. I’ll just let that play out.”Head gave nothing away, on or off the pitch. But as Australia look to find an opening partner for Head in white-ball cricket who can replicate David Warner’s output, there is a growing sense that Head himself could have the same impact as Warner across formats. Whatever decision Australia’s selectors make, it could define their home summer.

He has all the physical gifts a fast bowler needs, and all the skill to go with it. At Kingsmead he showed he may be letting go of the self-doubt that had clouded him for so long

Firdose Moonda28-Nov-2024When you’re more than two metres tall, with a moustache the size of caterpillar on your top lip, and can consistently bowl in the 140s, it’s going to be difficult to convince people that you’re the nervous type, but Marco Jansen is. Or maybe was.Jansen is now the bowler who has taken the joint-fewest number of deliveries to complete a Test-match seven-for: 41. He did this in an explosive spell of movement and bounce that tested the Sri Lanka’s batters’ techniques and ripped them apart. And he did it without the kind of vein-popping aggression that a bowler doing that kind of damage may employ. Jansen is not really that kind of player. He is unassuming, shy, and can get down on himself, even when it’s clear he has all the ingredients to go down as one of the greats.Related

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Take the ball that beat Dhananjaya de Silva’s defence. It moved just enough to swerve through the bat-pad gap. It was full, but not too full. De Silva wanted to drive and got an inside-edge, and Jansen was rewarded with the dreamy sight of the stumps shattering behind the batter. Four overs before that, he had Angelo Mathews reaching for a ball off the back foot and getting a thick outside edge to first slip. The most excited person on the field was Tristan Stubbs, who whooped from third slip and jumped on his team-mates. Jansen was perhaps pensively considering the magnitude of what he had done: removed Sri Lanka’s two most experienced batters to put South Africa in a position to stamp their authority on the game. He bowled his next few overs buoyed with a different kind of confidence; a far cry from the player who, just a year ago, was a shadow of this.Remember last year’s 50-over World Cup where Jansen was South Africa’s new-ball ace before they ran into India and he got the yips? Well, he admitted that he had needed, before the match, a chat with his father and a few Bible verses to calm himself down. Seven months later, he had to play India again, in the T20 World Cup final, and was South Africa’s most expensive bowler in a match that has been archived alongside other ghosts of tournaments past.He went on to play in Major League Cricket (MLC) but, on his return home, not only was he carrying a shoulder niggle but also mental fatigue. Cricket South Africa (CSA) recognised the need to put him on an extended break. They have explained these as “conditioning blocks” intended to address a variety of issues associated with the modern game, including, but not limited to, too much of it. And the time away has left Jansen “a lot more refreshed” and ready to perform under pressure again.”It’s similar to the physical; it feels like I can go for longer periods of time and concentrate at a higher level, which is what you ultimately want as a cricket player, especially in Test cricket,” he said at the post-day-two press conference in Durban.Jansen found just enough movement to find a way through the gap between Dinesh Chandimal’s bat and pad•AFP/Getty ImagesSo yes, there’s a difference between this Test match and the two examples mentioned above. This match isn’t being played in front of a partisan and passionate crowd, and it’s not a final, but South Africa were bowled out for 191 at a ground where their recent history is poor. Though the pitch was not the spinner-friendly sort it had been in 2019, when Sri Lanka last won here, batting conditions were testing and Sri Lanka’s seamers exposed South Africa’s inexperience. Add to that that they also lost a bowler, Wiaan Mulder, while he was batting and two of the other three seamers – Jansen and Gerald Coetzee – had both not played a Test in almost a year, and that was reason to be concerned.By the fourth over, any lingering worries would have started to evaporate. Both new-ball bowlers had wickets and Sri Lanka’s batters were being forced to play at deliveries they may otherwise have left because of the lengths South Africa were bowling. “We assessed that the fuller ball or the ball that hits the stumps three-quarters of the way up, was easier to play even though the ball was nipping,” Jansen said. “Whereas when we bowl a length that hit the top of the stumps or higher, the ball has a longer time to move. After the first five wickets fell in our innings, we saw that that particular area was a good length. And then it’s just a case of making the batters play. If the batters leave well on length and in line, then it doesn’t particularly matter where you bowl. But if you can try and make them play as much as possible, then you’re always in the game.”It could be argued that four of Sri Lanka’s top seven could have left the deliveries they chose to go after and three of those – Pathum Nissanka, Mathews and de Silva – were against Jansen. A fourth, Dinesh Chandimal, had his defences breached both because he failed to close the bat-pad gap and because Jansen got the ball to move just enough to find a way through.Does that mean Kingsmead is on its way to regaining its reputation for the green mamba rather than the subcontinent-like substitute? “The groundsman said the wicket was going to have a bit of pace and consistent bounce,” Jansen said. “Seeing the grass yesterday, we thought the new ball was going to have an effect and then spin might come into the game quicker. But by the looks of it, I think we can strike with the new ball and make it count, I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of overs of spin.”‘We bowled really well in terms of our intensity and the energy of the ball’ – Jansen•AFP/Getty ImagesKeshav Maharaj did not bowl at all in Sri Lanka’s first innings, which only lasted 13.5 overs, but Prabath Jayasuriya has sent down 20 overs and has already taken four wickets. “The ball is turning,” Jansen said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if Temba [Bavuma, South Africa’s captain] brings Kesh on and sees what happens.”There’s much cricket to be played between now and South Africa bowling again, including Bavuma’s second innings. Jansen equated his first-innings 70 with the value of a century because it was “crucial, especially with the ball seaming around and nipping around.”Bavuma was batting on the first day, when South Africa expected it to move around. They were pleasantly surprised that it did the same on the second, helped by overnight rain which the Test has (hopefully) seen the last of. But it wasn’t only the conditions that they took advantage of. “We bowled really well in terms of our intensity and the energy of the ball, because we realised that the ball was moving nice and quick off the pitch, which is always what we want as bowlers,” Jansen said.He used “we” because it was a collective effort but he was a major part of that, and he might still be too modest to say so. Since coming back from this period of forced rest and rehabilitation, Jansen played eight games before this Test with a best return of 3 for 34 in a domestic T20. Like everyone in South Africa’s attack, the T20Is against India were punishing but he was their most economical bowler. A noticeable difference is how much more he seems to trust his own skills and how much more aggressive he is in his approach. All of that contributed to his 7 for 13 on Thursday, and while those figures may be scarcely believable, they will give him belief for a long time to come.

The defending champions have lost three in a row, leaving their hopes of a three-peat greatly diminished

Firdose Moonda14-Jan-2025As far as title defences go, it’s fair to say Sunrisers Eastern Cape have gotten off to the worst possible start. They’ve slumped to their three biggest defeats in their history – their largest by runs in the tournament opener against MI Cape Town – and their two biggest by balls remaining in their losses to Paarl Royals and Pretoria Capitals, and thoughts of a trophy three-peat have become ever-more distant.It’s still early in SA20 2025 but the initial indications are that a significant part of the problem is in the top order, where Sunrisers have not fired. Across the three matches, their highest score by a top-three batter is Zak Crawley’s 27 against Royals, and collectively, their top three has scored 85 runs at an average of 9.44. In season 1, the top two averaged over 30 and in season 2, 22.67. There is time to build back up to that but they will need to turn things around quickly and that may start with settling on their opening pair.With Dawid Malan not part of the squad this season, Sunrisers started with Jordan Hermann and Crawley but then played against Capitals with Crawley and David Bedingham. Batting coach Russell Domingo explained that Hermann’s omission was to open up a spot for allrounder Patrick Kruger.”It was just to bring in another option. Patrick Kruger was available for the first time because he had been struggling with a cough and he is a starting player for us,” Domingo said. “David Bedingham’s obviously a quality player so we decided to give him an opportunity up the order where he’s probably best suited.”ESPNcricinfo LtdBut Bedingham has been struggling recently. Since his 59 in the Chattogram Test, he has had 12 innings across formats and been out in single figures six times. On five occasions, Bedingham has been caught by the wicketkeeper or in the slips and there may be concerns around how tight he is outside off stump.The reading is not much better for Sunrisers’s key batter Tristan Stubbs. He was their top-scorer last season but is also in a rut. Since his second-innings century in the Durban Test against Sri Lanka, Stubbs has been out in single figures five times in nine innings. His most common mode of dismissal is with deliveries in line with the stumps, when he has been late on shots and either bowled or lbw, which suggests there’s an issue with the timing of his strokes.Through Bedingham, Stubbs and captain Aiden Markram, Sunrisers will expect to score most of their runs, especially as they carry a fairly long tail. Marco Jansen’s form at No.7 is a welcome bonus though his main job is to operate as their strike bowler, another area they seem to be lacking in.Ottneil Baartman, who enjoyed a breakthrough tournament last year, missed out on the first match, returned with figures of 0 for 33 in 2.4 overs in Paarl and then took 1 for 9 at SuperSport Park. In Craig Overton and Richard Gleeson, Sunrisers have the personnel but the attack needs their batters to give them something to work with, which Markram knows. In the post-match presentation, he acknowledged lack of runs as the main concern but cited the quick turnaround between games as being one of the hurdles that can be difficult to overcome. “When you’re trying to look for form, it can be quite tough,” he said.Zak Crawley hasn’t yet fired as Sunrisers Eastern Cape’s opener•SA 20This is already a slightly different line to the one he had voiced two days ago, when Sunrisers lost to Royals. That defeat came two days after they lost to MICT in the tournament opener and Markram was asked how a team can properly address form concerns in a schedule where matches come thick and fast. His answer suggested they just have to roll with the punches.”You almost get used to dealing with things really quickly and then moving on. I don’t think you have much of a choice nowadays with the amount of cricket that we play,” he said then. “Of course, pay attention to areas that need attention but it’s really important to bank that, make notes of it and then to wake up the next day and either do something about it or play another game of cricket. From an emotional side, I think each person is quite different. I generally don’t try to get too high when things are going well and low when things aren’t going well. I try to stay consistent. Obviously, easier said than done.”That day, Markram also said his is an outfit that “are all not really good at losing” and would be able to pick themselves up quickly. Two more days have gone past and they find themselves at an even lower point.”We know we haven’t played well in these last three games and we need to make our own luck,” Domingo said. “We need to do the basics a little bit better which we’re not doing at the moment. Fortunately there’s still seven games to go. We know it’s a long competition. We haven’t started well in this competition in previous editions and managed to find our way and hopefully we can get into that sort of form, and that sort of confidence in the next couple of weeks because we’re running out of time and we need to make a play.”Sunrisers did not win either of their opening matches in season one or two but this is their third successive defeat in SA20 2025. So they’re already further behind than they have been before. That means the need to turn things around is more pressing and their attempt to do that will take place in three days’ time. They travel to Kingsmead for their next match against Durban’s Super Giants on Friday.

It’s a format where you need a slice of luck to be able to showcase your skill, which Abhishek did, and how!

Karthik Krishnaswamy13-Apr-20251:54

Jaffer: Abhishek has given SRH a new lease of life

“He was a bit lucky as well, even though he played an exceptional knock which was out of this world, to be honest.”This was Shreyas Iyer, interviewed immediately after his team, Punjab Kings (PBKS), had suffered an extraordinary defeat at the hands of Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH), who had chased down 246 with nine balls to spare courtesy a 55-ball 141 from Abhishek Sharma.If you hadn’t watched the match, Iyer’s words may have come across as a little churlish, a losing captain’s immediate reaction to losing a match from a position of immense strength.As a description of this innings, though, it was spot-on. Abhishek played an exceptional, out-of-this-world knock. He was also lucky. More than a bit.Related

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We’ll come to the luck, but first, a recap of Abhishek’s form coming into this game. His last four innings had brought him scores of 6, 1, 2 and 18. Abhishek’s top-order colleagues had also experienced lean runs over these four games, and SRH had lost all of them. At the start of IPL 2025, much of the talk surrounding SRH revolved around whether they could break the 300 barrier. Five games into the season, they had just one win and had lost more powerplay wickets (12) than anyone else. The approach of their top order, which had driven them to so many stratospheric totals, was now coming into question.Even SRH’s head coach seemed to be feeling the heat. He wasn’t yet asking his batters to tone down their aggression, but he was asking them to “respect conditions”, and “respect how well other teams are bowling”.As things turned out, those options weren’t exactly open to SRH when they began their innings on Saturday. They had just been asked to pull off the second-biggest chase in IPL history.This was the kind of chase that called for frantic boundary-hitting. It also called for a bit of luck.And luck smiled on SRH from the start. Both their openers got off the mark with boundaries that went in unintended directions, Abhishek’s via a slice to the deep-third boundary. And Abhishek hit his next ball in the air, over the fielder at short cover, where the leaping Marcus Stoinis only managed to get his fingertips to the ball.How good do you have to be for an opposition quick to give you a warm hug?•Getty ImagesLuck. It has four letters, but cricket discourse tends to treat it like a four-letter word, something to be spoken of in whispers, if spoken of at all. It has a significant influence on the fortunes (a revealing word in itself) of players and teams, but to talk about luck is to risk being accused of downplaying skill and effort.Let’s talk about luck, then, but let’s talk about both kinds of luck. Go back to Abhishek’s four previous innings before this one: 6, 1, 2, 18. A lot of things went into those scores: the bowlers and conditions he faced, the oppositions’ plans and how they were executed, and so forth, and also luck. Over those four innings, he only played seven false shots, and they brought about three dismissals. That’s outrageously bad luck by itself, before you factor in how his other dismissal came about: a mix-up when he was at the non-striker’s end.Abhishek was due a bit of luck when he began his innings against PBKS. And so were his top-order colleagues. Travis Head had been dismissed four times off 15 false shots, and the desperately unlucky Ishan Kishan four times off eight false shots.It’s unusual for every member of a top three to endure this sort of wretched luck at the same time. Perhaps SRH’s issues coming into this game didn’t stem from their approach, or not respecting conditions and their opponents’ plans. Perhaps they had just been plain unlucky.SRH were due a bit of luck, then, and they found it on Saturday. Abhishek was the biggest recipient, surviving seven false shots within the powerplay alone, including that chance to Stoinis and a catch at the backward-point boundary in the fourth over when Yash Thakur overstepped. The luck extended beyond the powerplay too, with mishits falling into no-man’s land multiple times, and a high, swirling chance that Yuzvendra Chahal couldn’t quite hold on to after aborting his follow-through and running towards the mid-on region.2:44

When everything comes together as it did on this surreal Saturday, Abhishek Sharma can make things look absurdly easy

Luck. It isn’t the opposite of skill, but as a batter, you sometimes need one to be able to showcase the other.Showcase was just what Abhishek did. Take the two balls either side of the Thakur no-ball, both hit for effortless sixes over the on side. Both balls were angled across Abhishek, one pitching on a good length and finishing around the top of off stump, and the other full enough to deny most batters elevation. He made light of the difficulty of working against the angle and slightly inconvenient lengths, putting both balls away with mere flicks of his wrist.Both these shots came within the first ten balls Abhishek faced. He’s made a habit of playing these types of shots early in his innings, and it perhaps takes a run of bad luck to truly appreciate how difficult it is to get off to starts like he does.His opening partner Head is blessed with this rare ability too, but even he wasn’t his usual self on Saturday; he went as far as leaving alone two of the first three balls he faced. It’s possible that the low scores and defeats leading up to this game had some effect on how he started.”Giving ourselves a chance,” Head said, when asked what he had discussed with Abhishek before SRH began their chase. “I was probably a little bit more patient in the first couple of overs in this game. They’ve got a quality couple of new-ball bowlers, I knew the sort of plans they were going to come [with]. Yeah, probably a little bit more quiet, and Abhi got off to a flier. So just trying to support him as much as I can.”You’ve got to be some player to make Travis Head, of all people, take on a supporting role.

“They had a pretty good plan for us, outside off [stump], but I just wanted to invent a few shots, which I think was very easy on this pitch because of the bounce and the size of one side”Abhishek Sharma

You’ve got to be some player to take a good-length ball from wide outside off stump and helicopter it 106m over midwicket. You’ve got to be some player to do this against a bowler as tall and bouncy as Marco Jansen. Abhishek played this shot because PBKS were trying to force him to hit to the longer square boundary on the off side, and he wasn’t going to let their plans constrain him.There were even two occasions – off Jansen and then Thakur – when he walked right across his stumps, exposed all three, and clipped yorker-length balls to the fine-leg boundary.”If you’ve seen me close enough, I never play anything behind the wicket, but still I was trying a few shots,” Abhishek said during his Player-of-the-Match interview. “They had a pretty good plan for us, outside off [stump], but I just wanted to invent a few shots, which I think was very easy on this pitch because of the bounce and the size of one side.”Yes, this was a beautiful pitch to bat on, and yes, Abhishek was hitting these shots to the smaller boundary. But no, they weren’t “very easy”. Not for most others.For Abhishek on this unreal day, though, anything seemed possible. SRH, chasing 246, became favourites nine overs into their innings, according to ESPNcricinfo’s Forecaster. Six balls later, their win probability had climbed to 79.38%.Abhishek Sharma finished on 141 off 55 balls, the highest individual score for an Indian at the IPL•Getty ImagesBy this stage, Abhishek had already reached 87. Three overs later, he went from 98 to 100 with an utterly uncharacteristic pair of clipped singles to long-on. Despite that hint of slowing down as he neared the landmark, he had brought it up in just 40 balls.To get to a century at that rate demands sustained risk-taking, and pulling it off demands an extraordinary amount of skill – and, sometimes, a little bit of luck. This was Abhishek’s third T20 hundred in 40 or fewer balls; no one else has done it as many times, and only three other batters have even done it twice.For a batter to score big and quick and do it on multiple occasions requires an ability to hit boundaries from the get-go and sustain that momentum through an innings, against pace and spin, within the powerplay and outside it. Abhishek can do all of that. And he has the self-belief to keep backing his methods even when he’s gone through streaks of low scores and rotten luck.When everything comes together as it did on this surreal Saturday, Abhishek can make things look absurdly easy. Don’t ever let that fool you.

Alan Gardner, Andrew Miller and Vithushan Ehantharajah chat about the first Test of the summer as England face Zimbabwe after a gap of two decades

ESPNcricinfo staff20-May-2025The arrival of Zimbabwe for their first Test against England since 2003 kickstarts a concentrated eight-month period for Brendon McCullum’s team, encompassing a five-match India series and the Ashes in Australia. On this week’s podcast, Alan Gardner is joined by Andrew Miller and Vithushan Ehantharajah to preview the game. Topics for discussion include Sam Cook’s Test debut, Bazball’s need to reconnect, and the challenge for Zimbabwe, as well as the announcement of England’s white-ball squads to face West Indies.

The format of the WTC discourages defensive cricket, and that has made Test matches look and feel very different to what they were – the story in numbers

Sampath Bandarupalli07-Jun-2025In November 2015, South Africa lost an away Test series for the first time in nearly a decade when they went 2-0 down after three of the four Tests in India.In the final Test, a dead rubber in Delhi, South Africa focused solely on playing for a draw instead of trying to get a consolation win when set a target of 481 in five full sessions. To achieve that, they scored 143 runs in 143.1 overs. They were on track for the longest time, but then lost their last five wickets in just 31 balls after tea on the final day. Morne Morkel was the fastest scorer with a strike rate of 33.33.No team in the 152-year history of Test cricket has gone that long while scoring as slowly.Fast forward ten years, and teams have a solid reason to do what South Africa tried to do in Delhi. You get four crucial points to help your cause on the World Test Championship (WTC) table, after all, and prevent the opposition from claiming the full 12 points.Except, no one seems to be thinking that. There were only four draws in the WTC cycle which will have it’s winner at Lord’s in just over a week’s time.

Shamar Joseph’s brilliance in Brisbane or the thrilling England win in Trent Bridge? Which Test was better? Vote now!

ESPNcricinfo staff24-May-2025Update: This poll has ended. The AUS-WI 2024 Brisbane Test moves into the quarter-finals.England hold their nerve – Trent Bridge, 2005It was a Test of two halves.The first 11 sessions were about England’s march to a 2-1 lead in the fourth game of the Ashes. The 12th and final session, in which England were chasing a small(ish) target, was dragged into a great fight from the time Shane Warne took a wicket off his first ball. Had Australia won, they would have retained the Ashes with a game to spare.England were so dominant that they forced Australia to follow-on after being bowled out for 218 inside 50 overs. Andrew Flintoff’s 102 off 132 balls and Geraint Jones’ 85, had propelled England to 477. In the third innings, Australia rode on half-centuries from Justin Langer, Michael Clarke and Simon Katich to post 387 and set England a target of 129.It wasn’t a cakewalk for England, though.The fourth innings lasted only 31.5 overs, where Brett Lee and Warne led a courageous Australian fightback. There was a period of calm when England moved from 32 for 1 to 103 for 4. But when Lee dramatically dismissed Kevin Pietersen and Flintoff to leave England at 111 for 6, Australia sensed a comeback. In the next over after Flintoff’s dismissal, Warne – who had by then picked up three wickets – removed Jones. It was left to Ashley Giles and Matthew Hoggard to fight it out. Slowly, they picked off the runs even as Lee peppered Hoggard with a mixture of bouncers and yorkers. Giles hit the winning runs to the delight of a joyous England balcony.

Shamar stuns Australia – Brisbane, 2024

Carl Hooper and Brian Lara broke down. Even the most patriotic Australian fans cheered for the opposition. The world Test champions were stunned. It was all because one bowler with a broken toe who staged a siege at the Gabba.Australia hadn’t lost a Test to West Indies since 2003, or at home since 1997. They had never lost a pink-ball Test. That changed in Brisbane.They came into the second Test having decimated West Indies in Adelaide inside three days. At the Gabba, Australia replied to the visitors’ 311 with 289 for 9 declared. West Indies fought for 193 in their second innings, setting a 216-run target.But more importantly, Shamar Joseph had retired hurt after a Mitchell Starc yorker crushed his toe. Australia lost Usman Khawaja and Marnus Labuschagne early in the chase, but Steven Smith and Cameron Green took them to stumps, requiring 156 runs to win. Shamar hadn’t bowled at all on the third evening.On the fourth afternoon, Smith and Green looked comfortable. Then Shamar arrived. He conceded 19 runs off his first ten balls and then removed Green and Head. He kept bowling – removing Mitchell Marsh, Alex Carey, Starc, and Pat Cummins in a fiery spell.All this while, Smith kept at it. But when Alzarri Joseph had Nathan Lyon with Australia still 25 adrift, the end was near. Fittingly, it was Shamar bowled Josh Hazlewood to seal a famous win, finishing with stunning figures of 7 for 68. It was a performance that single-handedly elevated Shamar to stardom.

He got there in his 64th T20I, getting rid of Oman’s Vinayak Shukla. Here’s a stats highlight of Arshdeep’s T20I career

Shubh Agarwal19-Sep-2025In a flash…Having made his T20I debut in July 2022 against England, Arshdeep has completed 100 wickets in only three years and 74 days. It is the second-quickest for a fast bowler after Bahrain’s Rizwan Butt, who reached the milestone in two years and 240 days. No other bowler has completed 100 T20I wickets in under four years.Arshdeep, however, pipped Butt in terms of balls bowled and matches played for a fast bowler (see graphic below). Overall, Arshdeep is only behind Rashid Khan, Sandeep Lamichhane and Wanindu Hasaranga on that parameter.In terms of average, Arshdeep’s 18.37 is the best for a seamer from a Full Member nation and the third-best behind Butt (16.68) and Oman’s left-arm quick Bilal Khan (16.95) overall.Vinoo Mankad, Kapil Dev, Arshdeep SinghVinoo Mankad was the first India bowler to reach 100 wickets in Test cricket, getting there in his 23rd Test. In ODIs, Kapil Dev was the first India bowler to bag 100 wickets, getting there in his 77th game in 1986. Arshdeep has reached the 100-wicket mark in his 64th T20I. Among the Full Member sides, only South Africa, West Indies and Zimbabwe don’t have a bowler in the T20Is 100-wicket club.ESPNcricinfo LtdA consistent wicket-takerArshdeep has picked up 43 wickets in the powerplay in T20Is, averaging 20.06 at an economy of 7.50 in that phase. No other bowler has more wickets than him in powerplays since his debut.Arshdeep is also very reliable at the death. His 48 wickets in the last four overs are nine more than the next best, Hong Kong offspinner Ehsan Khan. In terms of fast bowlers, next in line after Arshdeep is Pakistan’s Haris Rauf.Defying tough home conditionsThe surfaces in India have generally been high-scoring in T20I cricket and while Arshdeep’s economy at home has suffered, his wicket-taking ability still remains unmatched. Only six fast bowlers have over 20 T20I wickets in India. While Arshdeep (28) is third on the wickets’ list, behind Bhuvneshwar Kumar (34) and Hardik Pandya (31), his average of 21.00 is the best among them.Left is rightThirty-eight of Arshdeep’s 100 wickets are of left-hand batters, comfortably the highest for any bowler since Arshdeep’s debut. In fact, only six other bowlers have more than 20 left-hand batters’ wickets in this time frame.In the powerplay, Arshdeep averages only 13.36 against left-hand batters as compared to 25.37 against right-hand batters. His 19 wickets in the powerplay against left-hand batters are the joint-highest, alongside Tim Southee.There are seven batters Arshdeep has dismissed three or more time in T20Is. Four of them are left-hand batters, all from the top order. His numbers against Rilee Rossouw stand out. Arshdeep has dismissed Rossouw three times in five balls without conceding a run. Former New Zealand offspinner Nathan McCullum had earlier done that against Zimbabwe’s Charles Coventry: 5 balls, 3 dismissals, 0 runs.A star in T20 World CupsThe 2024 T20 World Cup has been the most productive competition for Arshdeep so far, bringing him 17 wickets in eight innings. His contribution was overshadowed by Jasprit Bumrah’s brilliance, but Arshdeep’s economy of 7.16, coupled with an average of 12.64, was vital in India’s title run. His nine wickets in the death overs were the joint-highest for any bowler.He also picked up ten wickets in the 2022 T20 World Cup, becoming the highest wicket-taker for India in both the World Cup editions he has featured in.