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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Not every cricketer is great, or good, or useful. This begs a question. Who routinely contributed the least to their team? Which Test cricketer was the biggest burden?

Back in November, we took a look at the worst Test bowling averages of all time. As you might imagine, quite a lot of the contenders were part-timers.

You can bowl very badly and still be well worth a place in a Test team purely on the strength of your batting. You can also be a poor bowler and offset your inadequacies to some degree with some fairly middling batting.

So let’s weed out those guys and pose a bigger question. Who has contributed the least? Which Test player has been the heaviest dead weight carried around by his side?

What we’re interested in here are the players who are barely even one-dimensional: the number 11s who offered very little with the ball and the very worst specialist batsmen.

Here are our contenders….

(Thanks to Tim who suggested we look at the gap between players’ bowling and batting averages, which was the starting point for this.)

Rubel Hossain, Bangladesh – 27 Tests, 265 runs at 9.46 and 36 wickets at 76.77

If we impose a qualification of having taken at least 20 Test wickets, the player with the greatest differential between his batting and bowling averages is of course good old Rubel Hossain, who figured prominently in that worst Test bowling averages piece.

Some people’s definition of an all-rounder is a player who averages more with the bat than the ball. Rubel managed to average 67.31 more with the ball than with the bat.

Second on this list is England’s Ian Salisbury, who averaged more than Hossain with the ball (76.95) but saved himself from complete ignominy by averaging 16.72 with the bat.

Salisbury even made a fifty. Responding to Pakistan’s 505-9 at Old Trafford in 1992, he arrived at the crease at 256-7. England saved the follow-on and the match was drawn, so actually that was pretty useful and therefore not at all what this article is about.

In contrast, Rubel’s one significant Test performance was a five wicket haul against New Zealand in 2010, the usefulness of which is very much up for debate.

He took 5-166 off 29 overs and Bangladesh lost the match by 121 runs.

Rubel’s a contender.

Mohammad Sami, Pakistan – 36 Tests, 487 runs at 11.59 and 85 wickets at 52.74

Work = Force × Distance so although Hossain was clearly a very heavy burden to lug around, we need to credit players who were carried for longer.

Our next contender is therefore Mohammad Sami, who averaged 41.14 more with the ball than with the bat.

Part of the art of deadweightery is to find a way of continuing to hinder your side for as long as possible. Sami bowled badly, but in taking wickets semi-regularly, he somehow did enough to earn a moderately long Test career.

While Hossain only conceded 2,764 runs in his Test career, Sami hung around long enough to concede 4,483.

And 85 wickets is a lot. It is enough to bowl a team out eight times. Then think about what a team would have achieved if it had taken those wickets at 52.74? Four heavy defeats, that’s what.

Sami’s a contender.

Phil Tufnell, England – 42 Tests, 153 runs at 5.10 and 121 wickets at 37.68

This one feels wrong because back in the Nineties Tuffers was the good spinner; the one who actually spun the ball. Okay, Robert Croft could bat – but Peter Such couldn’t. Why is he not on the list?

Peter Such is not in the list because he played far fewer Tests than Tufnell and (surely only because of this) had a better bowling average.

Tufnell’s batting-bowling average deficit of 32.58 is the worst of players who have taken more than 100 Test wickets. We also have to consider his fielding.

Robelinda saw fit to title this clip “The most retarded fielding of all time”.

Tuffers took 12 catches in his 42 Tests, but it’s worth highlighting that Sami’s record – seven catches in 36 Tests – is even worse. (Bucket Hands Hossain took 11 in his 26 Tests.)

However, it’s worth pointing out that Tuffers was often asked to bowl defensively, as proven by a Test economy rate of 2.42 runs an over that is actually better than Glenn McGrath’s.

With the ball, he did some kind of a job. Tuffers is not a contender.

Chris Martin, New Zealand – 71 Tests, 123 runs at 2.36 and 233 wickets at 33.81

Hats off to Chris Martin who earns a mention despite having an entirely respectable Test bowling record. Averaging 31.44 more with the ball than with the bat is no mean feat when you bowled as well as Martin did.

123 runs in 71 Tests is just incredible, while a catch-snaffle rate of just 14 in 71 Tests is almost as impressive.

We’re almost tempted to consider Martin a contender, but in the world of none-dimensional cricketers, the one-dimensional cricketer is king.

Saleem Elahi, Pakistan – 13 Tests, 436 runs at 18.95

So what of the batsmen? One thing you can say about everyone above is that they at least played a part in the matches in which they featured – even if that part really only involved the conceding of lots of runs. Because of the nature of the job, batsmen can ascend to a higher plane of irrelevance by shunning centre stage for 99 per cent of a five-day match.

Saleem Elahi is a sly dog. Saleem nearly weaselled his way out of this section by executing a mystery stumping against Sri Lanka in 1997, but – and we cannot emphasise this enough – Saleem Elahi is not a wicketkeeper. Wicketkeepers are useful even if they don’t score runs. (New Zealand’s Murray Chapple (14 Tests, 497 runs at 19.11) will be pleased we picked up on Elahi’s subterfuge because otherwise this section would have been about him.)

Elahi was picked for Pakistan’s one-day side despite never having played a first-class match. In true Pakistani style, he duly scored an unbeaten hundred on debut.

Then, in equally Pakistani style, he manifestly failed to build on this. His Test career in particular was magnificent. His solitary fifty came against England at Faisalabad in 2000. He was dismissed by Ashley Giles in both innings and the match ended a draw.

He did execute that stumping though. We can’t take that away from him.

Noel McGregor, New Zealand – 25 Tests, 892 runs at 19.82

As we’ve said, we’re giving value to the size of a player’s body of work here and to play 25 Tests as a specialist batsman with a batting average of 19.82 is an incredible thing.

You know what that’s like? That’s like seeing Ashley Giles in the nets and concluding, “Yes. Yes we will pick him for the Test team. We will pick him for the Test team and play him as a specialist batsman.”

Set against that, playing Pakistan in Lahore in 1955, McGregor top scored with a hundred. New Zealand lost, but he wasn’t being carried that day. He scored three fifties against South Africa too.

In truth, run-scoring wasn’t a particularly big thing for New Zealand back in those days, so McGregor isn’t really a contender.

Javed Omar, Bangladesh – 40 Tests, 1,720 runs at 22.05

Kind of like a super-sized McGregor, Omar bumbled his way through a remarkable volume of Test cricket, considering what he brought to the side.

He did however carry his bat in Bangladesh’s first overseas Test, against Zimbabwe in Bulawayo in 2001, which, let’s be honest, is quite a significant feat given the context. It was also his debut.

A Test strike-rate of 38.14 also hints that he kind of did a job at the top of the order.

Conclusion

Before we pick someone, there is a far bigger question we need to address first. The question is this: Did Saleem Elahi and Mohammad Sami ever play in the same side?

The answer, we’re delighted to inform you, is yes.

Saleem Elahi and Mohammad Sami played five Tests together, which means that in those matches Pakistan were basically fielding a nine-man team.

Elahi averaged 17.44 in those games.

Sami – somewhat disappointingly – took 19 wickets at 28.73, which is actually pretty good. This means that there were multiple occasions when Mohammad “85 wickets at 52.74” Sami wasn’t the worst player in the Pakistan side. Heavily underlining this, he also averaged more than Elahi with the bat – 19.00 (despite a top score of 17).

In terms of how Pakistan’s self-inflicted handicap matches went, they beat New Zealand and also Zimbabwe (twice) but lost to South Africa (twice). The margins of defeat in the South Africa matches were 10 wickets and an innings and 142 runs.

Crucially, Sami took 3-70 and 5-36 in the New Zealand win.

It is pretty obvious that Saleem Elahi was a greater burden – but not as great a burden as Rubel Hossain whose career-best performance saw him concede six an over for 30 overs as the opposition racked up 553-7 declared.

Rubel Hossain was the heaviest dead weight carried round by a Test team.

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< 1 minute readChris Martin has always struck as being a good bowler with a knack for not taking wickets. Opening the bowling in India and dismissing Gambhir, Dravid, Tendulkar, Raina and Dhoni in no time at all, it’s safe to say he no longer has that knack.

Or perhaps he now has a very specific knack – a knack for dismissing Gambhir, Dravid, Tendulkar, Raina and Dhoni in no time at all in the second innings of Test matches taking place in Ahmedabad. This is not a knack he’ll ever be able to make use of again, but it’s better than having a knack for slipping on rocks and landing on a particular part of your upper thigh again and again and again.

No-one wants that knack – least of all us.

< 1 minute readThe angular-elbowed, overly springy-running, Kiwi namesake of Dorset-raised, middle-class Coldplay singer, Chris Martin, has been dropped by New Zealand. What do you make of this? (Assuming you can work out what ‘this’ is from that sentence.)

We partly think ‘who for?’ being as New Zealand don’t exactly have heaps of Test class players obscuring every inch of their idyllic scenery. The answer is Mark Gillespie, who seems okay, but ‘okay’ won’t help Chris Martin accept the decision.

Martin always has the look of a good bowler, but somehow never takes too many wickets. If we were a Test batsman, we’d love facing Chris Martin. You’d score a hundred and you could say that you did so against good bowling.

There are some mediocre bowlers who have the knack of taking wickets. Chris Martin has the knack of not taking wickets.