It’s a weird feature of cricket that you can go out in style but then still carry on playing for the whole of the rest of the day and probably a good chunk of the next day as well. Stuart Broad ended his batting career gloriously.

Never mind the artifice of the guard of honour, the key detail was that we got to see the greatest batter the game has ever seen play his finest shot one last time. Not only that, but James Anderson then seized the moment and promptly got himself out so that it also proved to be the final ball he faced in Test cricket.

On this occasion the Stuart Broad hook shot went for six, but it would have been just as appropriate if he’d been caught out after utterly skying it. Therein lies the brilliance of what has been the ultimate six-or-out shot and also the purest distillation of Broad’s particular brand of nonsense-brilliance.

Night-night, Nighthawk.

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Attacking is great and defending is boring and attack is the best form of defence. Also – we don’t know if you’re aware of this – but sometimes defending can be a great way of attacking. But that’s still a type of attacking, okay? OKAY!?

Swap ‘Bazball’ for ‘Numberwang’ and Michael Vaughan’s Ashes commentary increasingly resembles the dialogue in the famous Mitchell and Webb sketch. You get a little flurry of numbers and then each short barrage is punctuated with, “That’s Bazball!”

Vaughan favours the simplest and most popular definition of ‘Bazball’ – that it’s about smashing every single delivery when you’re batting. Other definitions are however available. Some acknowledge a more nuanced philosophy, while others reinterpret things to the extent that the word is stripped of all meaning.

The England team famously don’t use the term Bazball, of course. Led by Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, they’ve got a philosophy, but they see no reason to brand it.

One aspect of this philosophy relates not to the batting, but the rather overlooked sibling that is the bowling.

England’s bowling philosophy

“We have an ethos with the bat but also with the ball,” explained Stokes last year after playing New Zealand.

“The idea is to take 10 wickets and that is what we are trying to do; taking the scoreboard away in any situation. As long as we are taking 10 wickets, it doesn’t really matter how many runs we go for.”

Speaking after the first Test in that series, Stokes had said: “Throughout the whole week any field change or any bowling change that I made, was always to take wickets. It was never a case of just containing the run-rate or make it go a little bit dry for a bit and then see where we are.”

You hear the bowlers echo this regularly. James Anderson and Stuart Broad will speak about how rejuvenating it has been to adopt a different approach with a laser focus on taking wickets and taking wickets alone.

But then, inevitably, you arrive at a place where it suddenly isn’t that simple. And at that point, all you can do is resort to the usual ‘aggressive cricket can be all about playing really defensively‘ mental gymnastics.

How will England approach day five of the first Ashes Test?

“When you’ve got a set target to defend, you’ve got to keep one eye on the boundaries as well,” Broad is quoted as saying in Vithushan Ehantharajah’s Cricinfo piece this morning. “And actually, on a pitch like this, where it’s quite slow and hard to create a mistake from a batter, you don’t want to leak too many runs easily, waiting for that ball to break through.

“I think we’ll be smart with the fields we use. We need to protect the boundaries in certain players’ strengths. But ultimately our number one focus is to take wickets. And how do we do that? From creating pressure.”

So there you go. Slowing the batters’ run-scoring with more conservative fields is a form of OUT-AND-OUT ATTACK.

“You’ll probably see more fielders scattered around, almost like in-out fields. You know how Warnie used to bowl?” said Broad. “He’d have four people around the bat and three people on the boundary. Three an over is not hurting you, then you get the wicket and you can apply some pressure.”

All-out attack through balancing attack and defence and being flexible enough to shift the emphasis at appropriate times.

Woe betide anyone who tries to simplify cricket, because cricket’s having none of it.

Read this next: 10 things to watch out for during the Ashes

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With 15 minutes to go on day two, Stuart Broad walked out to bat at number four as England’s “Nighthawk”. Second ball he skied a hook that fell to earth after bowler and keeper left it for each other. It is hard to envisage a more Broad passage of play. Except for all the other ones.

To quickly recap the Nighthawk role, Ben Stokes described it as a nightwatchman who goes out there to slog and annoy the opposition rather than just dig in and block up an end, as is traditional.

As quite possibly the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been, Stuart Broad is a good fit for this innovative role. If you then factor in his destructive mayfly style of batting, you realise that Nighthawk is really his job and his alone.

Broad’s hook shot has long been the purest element of his batting ‘method’. Skying a hook and then watching it land between two passive fielders is therefore very Broad, very annoying and consequentially, very, very Nighthawk.

Just imagine the emotions in this moment as that pink blur travels unstoppably grasswards.

Now imagine the emotions a nanosecond later when everyone remembers that the batter who has benefited is Stuart bloody Broad.

So the moment itself certainly feels like peak Nighthawk. However, we’d argue that there remains room for improvement when it comes to the circumstances. Ask yourself whether there’s anyone in the weird wild wonderful world of Test cricket who’d be more annoyed to be involved in such a miss?

More Broad

• Let’s revisit the Netherlands’ win over England at the 2009 T20 World Cup and in particular the insanely chaotic final over from Stuart Broad
• Ranked: All eight deliveries in Stuart Broad’s world record 35-run over to Jasprit Bumrah
• Did you see… Stuart Broad’s secondary appeal?

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There aren’t many things in cricket more entertaining than a duck. A batter slowly walks out to try and make some runs and then slowly walks back again having failed to do so. It’s a miniature tragedy.

Great ducks come in many different flavours. There’s the duck you were expecting and the sheer delight (or frustration) of having that expectation met. At the opposite end of the scale, there’s the duck that comes when you were anticipating anything but a duck. The unexpected finality of such a moment provides an adrenal shock, like when a massive star is killed off in the opening scene of a film. Donald Bradman’s final innings is probably the best cricket example. (The Rock and Samuel L Jackson failing to last 15 minutes in The Other Guys is our favourite film example, even if it probably doesn’t exactly qualify.)

Between those extremes, you’ve got all manner of quirky ducks that can be elevated by the context or the manner in which they were achieved. A couple of examples: in 2021, Jasprit Bumrah was run out without facing a ball against England, and in 1999 Shahid Afridi made two golden ducks on the bounce, one against India and one against Sri Lanka. Afridi’s was by no means a unique feat, but it was very on-brand.

For this article, we’ve picked out eight players for their sterling contributions in the field of duck-scoring.

1. Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka

Murali has famously taken more Test wickets than anyone else. 14 golden ducks in 164 innings also means he’s the golden duckiest Test batter there’s ever been.

As Test duck-makers go, Murali wasn’t blessed with the same lack-of-skill as some of his rivals. His number 11 superpower was teaming the batting incompetence he had with absolutely zero judgement about what he should or shouldn’t have a ruddy great heave at. This pretty much mindless approach and his refusal to temper it even slightly, even after 400 international matches meant that for a good long while Murali was our favourite batter.

• Remembering Murali at the Oval in 98: The match when a true one-off revealed the awe-inspiring extent of his powers

Another player worthy of mention in the field of golden duck scoring is Sam Curran, who at the time of writing has managed six in 38 innings. This means that Curran, who generally tries to pass himself off as an all-rounder, has been out first ball a colossal 15.79% of the time.

2. Courtney Walsh, West Indies

If we’re talking plain old, take your time, no rush ducks, Courtney Walsh is of course the king with no fewer than 43 in 185 innings.

That is a hell of a lot of being dismissed without scoring.

3. Stuart Broad, England

Not far behind Walsh and still with a chance of passing him is Stuart Broad with 39 ducks in 232 innings. Broad earns special mention not just for having taken Murali’s approach to batting and built on it to become the greatest batter of all time, but for securing the most ducks while also having at least one hundred to your name.

• Is Stuart Broad the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been?

4. Chris Martin, New Zealand

For sheer duck density, it’s hard to look past Chris Martin who managed 36 in 104 innings, including a world record seven pairs. (No-one else has managed more than four.)

Martin was such an unutterably bad batter than he appeared in our list of Test cricketers who were the biggest burdens to their sides despite being an extremely good bowler.

Those who saw him bat may in fact wonder how he managed to avoid making a duck in the other 68 Test innings. Well, there were 28 nought not outs for a start. We were also struck by the suspiciously large number of four not outs (nine) which seem to suggest the edge down to third man was his most productive scoring shot.

5. Mervyn Dillon, West Indies

Brace yourself here, but the West Indies’ Mervyn Dillon was actually dismissed for a duck even more reliably than Chris Martin. He managed 26 in 68 innings.

There was however one pretty major difference between Dillon and Martin. Once Dillon got in – which is to say on the occasions when he wasn’t dismissed for exactly bugger all – he had a surprising tendency to go big.

By ‘go big’, we mean that on 14 occasions he made 19 runs or more. (We’d normally have a 20-run threshold here, but we were struck that Dillon made 19 on three occasions and 19 seemed a sizeable enough knock to qualify as ‘big’ in the context of an article about ducks.)  

6. Wavell Hinds, West Indies

One of Dillon’s golden ducks came in the 2000 Boxing Day Test against Australia and it wasn’t even close to being the worst innings of the match.

In the West Indies’ first innings, Wavell Hinds, batting at number three, was dismissed for a 10-ball duck. Nothing too remarkable about that, except that he was also dropped twice. We’re sure there have been other occasions when that’s happened to a batter, but given his batting position and the occasion, Hinds’ effort must surely rank pretty high on a list of the worst Test innings of all time.

7. Marvan Atapattu, Sri Lanka

A duck from a batter is so much more powerful than one from a number 11. So let’s move on to Marvan Atapattu, who made 22 ducks in 156 innings and also 16 hundreds, six of which were doubles.  

Steve Waugh actually made the same number of ducks, but it took him 260 innings. Waugh also didn’t deliver them with anywhere near as much panache.

Because if there’s one fact everyone should know about Marvan Atapattu, it’s how he began his Test career.

Atapattu made his debut against India in 1990 and began with a pair. In his next Test innings, against Australia in 1992, he made a third duck – a golden one to be precise. While a single in the second innings of that match must have been a weight off his mind, he nevertheless served up another pair in his third Test, against India in 1994.

Six innings into his Test career, Atapattu – a specialist batter – had five ducks and a 1 to his name.

(Irrelevant fact, but Atapattu is also one of only two players to have retired out in a Test match, along with Mahela Jayawardene, who did it in the same Test against Bangladesh in 2001.)

Ajit Agarkar, India

Ajit Agarkar – one of the worst batters ever to have hit a Test ton – once made five ducks in a row. While Atapattu’s effort is funnier because (a) he was a batter and (b) this was how he began a long and successful Test career in which he made over 5,000 runs at an average of almost 40, Agarkar does get a good few points for managing four golden ducks in a row to kick off that sequence.

You know you’re going some when a two-ball duck is an improvement on all of your previous four innings.

Agarkar’s incredible run of form only really came to an end because he left Australia and got to play against someone else. Incredibly, the next time he faced the Aussies, a year later, he made a pair.

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Some people said Stuart Broad’s 35-run over to Jasprit Bumrah reminded them of when Yuvraj Singh hit him for 36 in the T20 World Cup that time. But it was not like that. It was not like that at all. This was much, much better and funnier.

There’s actually a far more appropriate Broad over to compare this to, but we’ll come to that in a bit. For now, let’s rank all eight deliveries in escalating order of ridiculousness/greatness.

Chronology be damned!

8th best: Ball 5 (4 runs)

Taken in isolation, this delivery – length, inside edged to the boundary – could almost be mistaken for normal cricket. Not good enough, Ball 5. Try harder, Ball 5.

7th best: Ball 4 (4 runs)

Let’s be honest, it’s rare that a waist-high full toss slammed for four isn’t among the six silliest deliveries in an over. This is already a strong indication we’re grappling with something special here.

6th best: Ball 2 (5 runs)

Five wides over the keeper’s head. Have five free runs. Have five runs completely for free and then I’ll just go back and bowl the ball again.

5th best: Ball 1 (4 runs)

This is the one we agonised over the most because the five-run nonsense that we just ranked below it is such a perfect thing. But really this has to get extra points for setting proceedings in motion. This is the peg from which all else hangs. And it is an excellent peg. Broad bowled a short ball because historically doing that to Bumrah has always worked out brilliantly for England. They only lost a whole Test match earlier in this same series because of it. Bumrah flapped. Poor hapless Zak Crawley did not catch it.

It’s incredible to think this initial passage of play encouraged Broad and Stokes to think the short ball was the right option given that one mishit had already taken Bumrah sailing past what his Test average had been at the start of this series (2.26). You’re not buying Bradman’s wicket here, lads. Four runs is already a terrible exchange rate.

4th best: Ball 7 (6 runs)

This was the moment when a guy who has for most of his career struggled to average six nailed a guy with 550 Test wickets for exactly that many runs in one shot and in so doing soared into the lead for the most runs made off a single Test over. And yet it doesn’t even make the podium of ridiculous deliveries! In the context of this single over, that incredible, barely-believable development only ranks as mid-table nonsense. Ball 7’s failings were that the delivery was by this point predictable and also Bumrah hit it properly. Predictable bowling and hitting the ball properly are of course less funny than getting as many or almost as many runs while batting wholly inadequately.

3rd best: Ball 6 (4 runs)

We’re in “a picture is worth a thousand words” territory here. Just look at this perfectly normal four.

2nd best: Ball 3 (7 runs)

A wild top edge for six. What else was it going to be after two previous hugely successful short balls? The decision to dig another one in combined with the mess of a shot it elicited would be quite a heady brew if these were the only ingredients – but it was also a no ball. This is the crucial detail that earns this the runner up spot because it meant that one ball into his over Broad had conceded 16 runs.

Best: Ball 8 (1 run)

For many people, this was an anticlimax, but those people are wrong. Firstly, it was a scrambled single and scrambled singles are always hilarious. Secondly, it was a scrambled single after seven successive deliveries had gone to the boundary and therefore pretty much the last thing anyone expected. Thirdly, it was a scrambled single that ABSOLUTELY DID NOT NEED TO BE TAKEN. What was the reasoning behind going for one risky run when you’re already making 34 runs an over without even leaving your crease? What was the thinking? Why did this happen? The answer is that on some deep down level everyone involved understood that this over, and therefore this final ball, was far more important than the match as a whole. Everyone knew that this over could not be allowed to end with an unremarkable dot ball and so it came to pass that it instead climaxed with Stuart Broad demolishing the stumps with his body.

And that’s the clincher really because that act also serves as a tribute to of one of the few overs in international cricket history that can rival or perhaps even surpass this one; an over that was also bowled by Stuart Broad and which also saw him dive headlong into the stumps.

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When the opposition make 550, it’s rarely because of a missed catch. It’s more a result of all the other chances that weren’t even created. At the same time, an innings of 550 will tend to feature a fair few misses, if only because it’s such a huge volume of cricket.

England missed a whole bunch of chances during New Zealand’s innings in the second Test. That’s very unhelpful, but the silver lining is that it can also be funny.

Remember the rich tapestry of emotions when Stuart Broad dropped yet another catch off James Anderson against Pakistan a couple of summers ago? That was really funny. Funny for how awful it was, yes – but still funny.

The backdrop to that one was that Rory Burns, in the slips, missed an easy catch and it went for four and then Zak Crawley, also in the slips, missed another chance later the same over. This is what gave Broad dropping an absolute dolly an over later its extraordinary emotional impact on all involved.

This is also how we got a couple of nice England slip catching moments at Trent Bridge this week. Several England fielders – chiefly Joe Root – swapped their hands for buttered cymbals early in the match and by the time the following misses came about, everyone was a bit fed up.

That’s the key ingredient really: overwhelming fed-upness.

Moment 1: Stuart Broad’s anguish

Bowlers never like seeing a chance go down, but sometimes they are capable of clinging to the logical truth that team-mates do not mean to drop the ball.

And then other times they are very much not able to remember that. Like when neither Jonny Bairstow nor Zak Crawley so much as moves a muscle as the ball passes between them.

Here is Stuart Broad’s initial reaction in which astonishment and frustration are vying for supremacy and together just about suppressing blind fury.

And here’s Broad half a second later when he’s had time to fully absorb what has happened and calibrate his emotions accordingly.

100% pure anguish.

And that tiny beige something that appears to be coming out of his mouth? That’s the last flecks of his spirit departing his body, that is.

Moment 2: Joe Root finally catches a cricket ball

With New Zealand 496-5, Joe Root finally, belatedly clung onto one.

Root has played plenty of Test matches. He has caught a lot of balls. He has dropped a lot of balls. You’d think a short spell of fielding rubbishness would be the kind of thing he’d shrug off and probably not even acknowledge really.

Absolutely not. Joe Root was stewing on his missed catches and apparently felt that the ball itself was a key protagonist in his tale of woe.

We’re honestly not sure we’ve ever seen someone focus their celebration at the ball before now.

“Ahhhhhh! In your FACE, ball! I caught you! I caught your stitchy red leather arse!”

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Stuart Broad has always been a bowler who makes the absolute least of his height. But Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum may have a plan…

Height is an attribute for a quick bowler. You don’t need data analysis to deduce this – a team photo’s enough. In most international teams the tall players are the quick bowlers.

There are plenty of exceptions obviously, but that doesn’t negate the fundamental truth. When the camera pans across your team’s faces during the national anthem, the first chest it hits will more than likely be a seamer.

This means that height has become a key metric for assessing bowlers. It is allied to a blunt assumption that bigger is better – but that isn’t actually the full story.

Stuart Broad is one of the finest examples. At 1.96m, Broad is much the same height as Morne Morkel – in fact he is often listed as being taller. Yet according to CricViz he releases the ball from 20cm lower.

With his bent front knee and curved torso at the point of release, Broad really does not make the most of his height. You wouldn’t call the bounce he generates skiddy, but you can’t really call it steepling either.

Excitingly, it sounds like England’s new Test leadership partnership has a strategy to address this.

“It’s been one of the most fun weeks we’ve had as a team,” said Broad this week. “Just the relaxed environment, the way we’re talking as a team. It’s not too structured, it’s just a case of what do you need to do to make you feel you’re 10ft tall?”

Imagine that! Imagine a 10ft Stuart Broad? Imagine the panicked giraffe batting if nothing else!

But imagine the bowling too. A 10ft bowler really would be a boon if Stokes and McCullum can somehow pull this off.

How do you make someone feel 10ft tall? You show faith in them and rather wonderfully it seems that one of the mechanisms that may be employed to embiggen the veteran seamer is sending him out to bat earlier “to go and have a slog”.

This was apparently one of McCullum’s potential plans during England’s successful run-chase against New Zealand at Lord’s. We can’t imagine this would encourage actual, physical growth, but we are very much in favour of this line of thinking anyway. Worth a go, isn’t it?

On a related note, Broad has also confirmed he didn’t have the foggiest what was going on for that secondary appeal of his the other day. Writing in The Mail, he said he was busy appealing for the LBW, “which wasn’t even hitting sixth stump down leg side so qualifies as one of the worst appeals ever.”

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Appealing is one of the great aspects of cricket and Stuart Broad is, in his own way, one of the all-time great appealers. At Lord’s, against New Zealand, he delivered a very fine secondary appeal.

If you missed it, Colin de Grandhomme was run out by Ollie Pope at slip while Stuart Broad was appealing for LBW.

This is how much Broad saw of the crucial moment.

What we like about the image above is how it indirectly highlights the innate excitability that underpins so much of Broad’s entertaining/annoying on-field work.

He has no way of knowing for certain that de Grandhomme is out. All that matters is that he might be. And that is all you need for an appeal. That alluring possibility.

So when Broad then notices that de Grandhomme’s stumps are down, he is visibly THRILLED.

The potential dismissal completely washes away all the disappointment of the turned-down LBW appeal in an instant.

Pointing like a giddy toddler, he gives de Grandhomme out.

Still high on the elation, he then bowled Kyle Jamieson next ball.

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James Anderson and Stuart Broad have been dropped from England’s Test squad. They’re not being rested. There’s no mention of that. They’re out. But they also might come back. It’s a soft binning.

There is more than one way to dispose of something you no longer want. There’s the unequivocal way – where you just open the bin and drop the item in – but there are equivocal ways too.

Garages, lofts, high-up cupboards. These are not so much storage locations as holding areas for the rubbish with which we have developed some kind of emotional bond. We make things easier for ourselves by moving these items into limbo to be disposed of on some unspecified future date.

> The Realm’s England XI – No.10 James Anderson

Anderson and Broad aren’t rubbish, of course. They are merely much-loved items that England are neither desperate to use nor dispose of.

So they’ve executed a soft binning.

“We felt that it was time to draw a line after the Ashes defeat, look forward and give some impetus with an influx of new players,” explained Andrew Strauss when announcing the squad for the upcoming West Indies tour.

“In respect of James Anderson and Stuart Broad, I want to emphasise this does not mean the end for them as England players,” he said. “It will be up to the new managing director and permanent head coach to decide on whether they will be involved this summer and beyond.”

Because that’s the scenario here. Anderson and Broad have been dropped by an interim management team. And that begs a question: If you’re dropped by a temporary coach and a temporary director of cricket, just how dropped are you? Really? How dropped are you when they explicitly float the possibility that you might return in the summer?

> Is Stuart Broad the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been?

At the same time, this is setting off down a particular path, isn’t it? It may well be down to the new Test coach to decide whether to ditch the nation’s two all-time top wicket-takers once and for all, but doing so would no longer be a bolt from the blue. It would be a bit more than a mere rubber-stamping but a lot less than springing it on everybody out of nowhere. That decision becomes a little easier. The initial heat of the furore will have passed. Half the plaster will already have been ripped off.

It becomes a recall rather than a retention too. Similar. But also different.

Is this devious machiavellianism on the part of Strauss et al? Probably not. But it’s nevertheless a decision that gives events a strong steer. They’ve given us not a clean break so much as a dirty fracture that may or may not heal.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang. But with an equivocal half-decision that will be reviewed by someone else at a later date.

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Sometimes a tail-ender throws the bat and gets a few runs. A quick 20 or 30 or even a half century. But a Test hundred? That’s a bigger thing. Who is the worst batter to have achieved that feat?

Many films generate a sense of tension by making the audience feel helpless. The easiest way to achieve this is by putting the protagonists up against a seemingly invincible foe.

The Terminator is a pretty classic example.

“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Kyle Reese

The Terminator feels so terrifying because fighting it seems so futile. Nothing’s going to faze it. The damn thing attacks a police station on its own and kills everyone.

The Terminator was almost impossible to stop, but stop it they did. That same sense of helplessness was then recreated in the sequel by making Robert Patrick’s T-1000 a shape-shifting, self-healing git.

One of the problems with the Terminator series since Terminator 2 is that it’s been hard to improve on that. This means the audience always has a sense of, ‘Well, they managed to stop the T-1000, so this current situation doesn’t really feel that bad.’

In cricket, that same feeling of helplessness can hit you from the exact opposite direction.

The 95

Anyone who saw Tino Best’s highest Test score will know what this article is about. In 2012, at Edgbaston, Best came out to bat at number 11 and made 95 runs.

It started with a few comically uppish drives, proceeded with a few outside edges for four and then at some point around the half century mark, Tino Best unexpectedly found that he could bat.

This is a thing that sometimes happens. It’s partly the batter and partly the bowling team, but mostly it’s the interaction between the two.

Sometimes a tail-ender slogs a few and everyone smiles, knowing they’ll be out soon. But sometimes they don’t get out. Sometimes they get their eye in and it just goes on and on.

Amusement becomes irritation becomes genuine concern. And then at a certain point – probably when the player reaches around 70 – the fielding side starts thinking to itself: “Wait a minute. If we were actually going to get this batter out, surely we would have done it by now?”

Deflation and fatalism set in and the next 20-odd runs are all-but-guaranteed because the only thing that will change the dynamic now is a looming hundred and the pressure of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach three figures in a Test match.

The point here is that while invincible foes can make you feel small, there is no sense of helplessness greater than when your team can’t even get the incompetent batters out.

Qualification criteria

In recent years, we have taken to imposing a ‘multiple Test hundreds’ clause to our definition of an all-rounder. A bowler can definitely make a hundred, but if that same player then hits a second hundred, you have to seriously consider reclassifying them.

It’s not a cut-and-dried thing, but we’d argue that as blunt instruments go, it gives pretty good results.

To give you some sense of how the rule plays out, it’s what separates Mitchell Johnson (one Test hundred) from players like Sir Richard Hadlee and Shaun Pollock (two Test hundreds).

> Who is Test cricket’s greatest number eight? (Or: Which Test bowler was the best batsman?)

We reckon the only person who really knackers things up in this instance is Harbhajan Singh, who made a hundred against New Zealand in November 2010 and then another one against the same opposition barely a week later. Two Tests tons or not, Harbhajan was not an all-rounder.

That particular detail doesn’t really affect us today though because we’re looking beneath that line. We’re limiting ourselves to players who hit just one Test hundred. (‘Just one’ is a somewhat ridiculous term to use about Test hundreds. How would you feel if you’d hit ‘just one’ Test hundred? That would probably be a thing you’d mention to people all of the time.)

Now obviously there are also a lot of capable batters who have only hit one Test hundred. We’re not looking for Dinesh Karthik, Nick Knight or – somewhat unusually for this website – Rob Key here. We’re looking for bowlers.

So let’s also impose a wicket requirement. Let’s limit ourselves to players who’ve taken at least 50 wickets because that way we know we got a long enough look at these guys to properly gauge their Test batting. 

Who is the worst batter to have hit exactly one Test hundred? These are our contenders…

Ajit Agarkar – 109 not out v England, 2002

We have a long track record of unkindness to Ajit Agarkar. We used to have him in the ‘rubbish player who still keeps getting picked’ seat. We are however confident that we can open the bidding with him in the knowledge that we’ll swiftly find someone worse at batting.

This is largely because it was Agarkar’s bowling that was crap (58 Test wickets at 47.32). His batting was only crap if you measured it against his occasional misguided billing as an all-rounder.   

Agarkar’s 109 not out against England at Lord’s looks pretty compelling on paper in that it is not supplemented by any Test fifties. He did however only play 26 Tests (only?!) and he did hit four first-class hundreds.

Agarkar has set a benchmark. But we can do better.

Stuart Broad – 169 v Pakistan, 2010

Is Stuart Broad the worst batter to have hit exactly one Test hundred? This is quite an easy one to answer because Stuart Broad is of course the greatest batsman of all.

Broad’s 169 against Pakistan does warrant a mention though because none of our other contenders have played anywhere near as many matches. To have played in over 150 Tests and made a whole bunch of fifties while only reaching three figures once is in many ways quite the feat.

Jason Gillespie – 201 not out v Bangladesh, 2006

An obvious suggestion and an extremely strong suggestion. Jason Gillespie managed two fifties in his first 70 Tests and then made 201 not out in his final Test innings after going in at three as a nightwatchman against Bangladesh.

This is arguably the definitive ‘We can’t even get this guy out!’ innings and indeed Matthew Hayden was the only batter dismissed for under 50 in Australia’s 581-4 declared.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that Gillespie did manage two other first-class hundreds. We’ll see how things go, but that’s got to count against him.

Anil Kumble – 110 not out v England, 2007

England probably shouldn’t play India in London.

While Kumble’s Test batting average of 17.77 exceeds Agarkar’s 16.79, his batting underperformance was far more protracted. He only hit five fifties in 132 Tests, which is an impressively small number. That average is also lower than Gillespie’s 18.73.

Gillespie still shades it for us though, not least because Kumble hit six other first-class hundreds, which is way too many, no matter how many games he played.

As a consolation prize, we do think Kumble played the most admirable shot to reach three figures. (The ball is near the helmet behind the keeper in the image below.)

Kevin Pietersen bowled a floaty, wide piece of shit and Kumble came down the pitch and turned it into a wide yorker.

After under-edging what we’d have to describe as a long-handled straight sweep, he dived for his ground, only to see the ball had evaded Matt Prior and gone for four. Wonderful stuff.

Mohammad Rafique – 111 v West Indies, 2004

The Bangladesh left-armer’s sole Test hundred – 111 v West Indies in 2004 – was also his sole first-class hundred.

So far, so good, but four fifties in 33 Tests is a bit damning.

Saqlain Mushtaq – 101 not out v New Zealand, 2001

Two fifties in 49 Tests is a much better ratio and Saqlain’s Test average of 14.48 is also highly compelling.

It’s tempting to dock the spinner a few marks because he came in after an intimidatingly run-hungry Pakistan middle order that comprised Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mohammad Yousuf and Younus Khan at four, five and six. (Weirdly, only two of them made hundreds – although after seeing Younus register a duck, Yousuf did at least ensure his was a double to make up the shortfall.)

That would be the wrong thing to do though. We’re not really rating the hundreds here – they’re taken as a given – it’s the career batting that contextualises the hundred that’s of interest to us. Saqlain’s record is not dissimilar to Gillespie’s: two Test fifties and a smattering more in first-class cricket. Gillespie’s superior averages probably give the Pakistani the edge though, particularly when you factor in the Australian’s regrettable first-class hundreds.

Saqlain is our new frontrunner.

Yasir Shah – 113 v Australia, 2019

Yasir Shah has made seven fifties in his 20-year first-class career, but not a single one in his 46 Test appearances. He did however make a ton in a day/night Test in Adelaide.

One of our very favourite things about this innings is that Pakistan looked at Yasir’s complete lack of scores and his Test average of 12.00, then then looked at their other bowlers and said, “Okay, you’re batting at eight.”

Eight! Yasir Shah managed to find a Test batting line-up where there were three batters thought to be worse than him. And then, against all odds, he comprehensively proved that assessment correct.

Step aside, Saqlain Mushtaq.

Jerome Taylor – 106 v New Zealand, 2008

Jerome Taylor arrived in Dunedin with a Test average of 13.66, a first-class average of 12.61 and a top score of 40. He then hit 106 runs.

A year later Taylor added another fifty against England, but that was the only other time he reached any kind of batting landmark in any form of professional cricket. It is a close-run thing, but we would argue that the sheer hollowness of Taylor’s overall career record is a sign that he was a worse batsman than Yasir Shah.

“It was the sort of pitch that, once you got in, it got easier,” said Taylor after making his hundred. Writing at the time, we asked how he was able to assess the pitch in this way given that he had never actually ‘got in’ before.

The secret to Taylor’s success was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a top tip from one of his team-mates – a man who made rather more than one Test hundred.

During Taylor’s innings, Shivnarine Chanderpaul apparently advised him: “Bat and bat and bat.”

Further reading:

• Goldenarms: The best part-time bowlers in the history of Test cricket
• The worst Test bowling averages of all time
• Which Test cricketer was the biggest burden to their side?

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