Cliff Notes – Captain Cummins in a league of legends feat Benaud, Imran and more
- Pat Cummins reached 300 Test wickets during the World Test Championship final, becoming the 40th bowler and the eighth Australian to achieve this milestone.
- He is the fifth-fastest bowler to reach 300 wickets, completing the feat in 68 Tests and 13,725 balls, with a remarkable strike rate of 45.75 balls per wicket.
- As captain, Cummins has taken 136 wickets, ranking second among pace-bowling captains, and holds the best average for an Australian seamer in Test victories.
Stats – Captain Cummins in a league of legends feat Benaud, Imran and more
Pat Cummins reached the milestone of 300 Test wickets, claiming his 14th five-wicket haul in the format during the World Test Championship final against South Africa. Picking five of the six South African wickets to fall on day two, Cummins finished with figures of 6 for 28 in 18.1 overs.
Six wickets short of the milestone at the start of the Test, he has now become the 40th bowler to reach the landmark and the eighth for Australia. Among pacers, he is the 30th to enter this club and the sixth for Australia.
He is the fifth-fastest to reach there in terms of balls bowled, completing 300 wickets in 13,725 balls, beating Malcolm Marshall by three deliveries. His bowling strike-rate of 45.75 balls per wicket is the best for an Australian seamer.
He also levelled with Imran Khan to become the joint 10th fastest to complete 300 wickets, reaching there in 68 Test matches.
Cummins has snaffled 136 wickets as the captain of his side. Among pace-bowling captains, only Imran has picked more wickets (187). Among Australian captains, only Richie Benaud is ahead by a slender margin of two wickets. Overall, only 10 bowlers have managed over 100 Test wickets as the captain of their side.
Cummins has been among Australia’s greatest match-winners with the ball in this format. Overall, 184 of his Test wickets before this WTC final came in wins. The likes of Jason Gillespie, Mitchell Johnson, Dennis Lillee, Brett Lee, Mitchell Starc and Glenn McGrath are ahead but no one has a better average than Cummins’ 18.09, which is bound to improve further if Australia clinch a win in this final to claim their second successive WTC title.
Also, he is only the second Australian to claim over 200 wickets in the WTC history, and the only pacer in the list with 206 wickets at 22.11 runs apiece.
Cummins has mostly been a first change bowler for Australia, coming in after the new ball bowlers in 48 of the 126 innings in which he has bowled in Test cricket. He is the only Australian pacer with more than 100 wickets as a first change bowler, with Peter Siddle behind him with 87 wickets on this metric. Among those who have over 50 wickets as the first change bowler, only Scott Boland (52 wickets) has a better average than that of Cummins (Boland 15.75, Cummins 24.50).
Overall, only four pacers have more than 100 Test wickets as first-change bowler – Courtney Walsh (106), Cummins (107), Morne Morkel (129) and Ian Botham (129).
Cummins made his Test debut in 2011. However, after a one-off Test where he was the Player of the Match against South Africa, he was sidelined from Test cricket for six years due to recurring injuries and made a return in 2017 when he played his second Test. England’s Joe Root has been the highest run scorer during Cummins’ career since November 2011, scoring 13,006 runs in this period.
Going head on against the best of his era, Cummins has dismissed Root 11 times, the most he has dismissed a batter in Test cricket, followed by Cheteshwar Pujara and Rohit Sharma (eight times each).
He also holds the record for the best bowling average for an Australian pacer in a calendar year with more than 50 wickets. He averaged 20.13 for his 59 wickets in 2019, bettering Lillee’s feat in 1981 – 85 wickets at 20.95 runs apiece.