Every player wants to go out on a high, but few actually do. Most topple forwards and face-plant when attempting to bow out in style. And that’s what life’s about. You do your best for a bit and then the ending’s probably going to be a little bit of a mess.

Sport is obsessed with great players going out in a blaze of glory; one final flash of genius before they swap their boots for slippers.

But while it can happen, the value of a ‘perfect’ ending is questionable anyway. What might seem like an immaculate full stop generally also brings with it the shadow of a question mark. Perhaps the player in question should have carried on just a little bit longer. And why is the memory of a final match any more significant than memories of all the other matches anyway? It’s all history.

In any case, the greatest final Test has already been and gone, so why bother trying to compete?

Glorious final Tests

Alastair Cook finished with a ton. Jason Gillespie exited with an unlikely double century. Muttiah Muralitharan secured victory and his 800^th Test wicket with his final delivery. Going further back, Vijay Merchant’s final two Test innings were 128 and 154 (albeit five years apart), while Seymour Nurse finished with three hundreds in his last six innings, vacating the stage with 258 against New Zealand.

But none of these are in the same league as Enid Bakewell.

Bakewell won her final Test for England, against the West Indies, after taking 10-75. She made 68 opening the batting in the first innings and made an unbeaten 112 in the second out of a total of 164. That’s 68.29% of the runs, which is more than even Charles Bannerman managed.

As Test performances go, it’s probably the best one.

So raise your hands, concede this one, and just play on. Play on until they’re forced to drag you from the field because you’ve turned into a massive great anchor holding the rest of the team back.

Paul Collingwood averaged 13.83 in his final series, but won the Ashes. That seems a good way to go out. He certainly seemed pretty pleased with it.

Inglorious final Tests

Before we get into this, let’s just quickly address the most immediately obvious final Test downer: Don Bradman’s duck.

To quickly sum up, the Don went into his final Test with an average of over 100 and was bowled second ball, which brought his average down into double figures.

This is, on the face of it, not an especially glorious finish – but think of it in terms of the story and the drama. Don Bradman started and ended this innings as the most consistently successful batter Test cricket has seen and so a duck was an incredibly big deal. Throw in the fact that it prevented him becoming the only player to average over 100 and this is pretty much the most famous innings of all time.

That is, in its own way, going out on a high. A three-figure average would have been an incredible feat, but 99.94 is barely less incredible and packs a far more powerful emotional hit.

1. Adam Voges, Australia

This is how you end on a downer. Briefly, during his innings of 239 against New Zealand in 2016, Adam Voges’ Test average exceeded Bradman’s. Then he was dismissed and over the course of the next half dozen Tests, that average went into a flat spin before concussion in a domestic match provided a timely reason for ejecting him.

Voges finished with a golden duck (at which point Australia were 8-4) and then 2 against South Africa in his 20th and final Test, his average dropping from 67.40 to 61.87 in the process. Australia were bowled out for 85 on the first day and suffered an innings defeat.

> Hot streaks: Test batters who hit a prolonged purple patch

2. Suresh Raina, India

What’s worse than a duck? A pair. Suresh Raina was never the most successful Test batter, but the contrasts in his final match were brutal. After Australia made 572-7 declared, India responded with 475. Australia declared again in the second innings but couldn’t bowl India out.

Raina’s contributions were a golden duck and a duck. His previous innings, against New Zealand, had also been a duck. All in all, he failed to score in five of his final seven innings. This is how to finish a Test career: unequivocally.

> Best of the blobs: Eight of Test cricket’s finest duck-makers

3. Geraint Jones, England

What’s worse than a pair? A pair while losing the Ashes, even though it’s only the third Test. Geraint Jones was picked as England wicketkeeper in large part for his batting, but bowed out with a pair in Perth in 2006, securing it either side of Australia’s 527-5 declared – an innings that included a 57-ball hundred from his opposite number, Adam Gilchrist. Jones was run out by Ricky Ponting in his final innings off a ball where he could quite easily have been given LBW.

4. Simon Katich, Australia

New Zealand’s Chris Martin is pretty much the patron saint of ducks. It was therefore fitting that in his final Test innings he should fall below even his own rock bottom standards by getting run out without even facing a ball. However, given Martin’s record, that wasn’t actually an especially ignominious finish for a man who ultimately went out with five zeros on the trot if you include not outs. You didn’t expect runs from Chris Martin. That most definitely wasn’t what he was there for.

Simon Katich though? He was an opening batter. That gives his final Test diamond duck far greater weight, even if he did go on to make 43 later in the match. Because really you could argue that first innings, first over dismissal shaped the 2010 Adelaide Test and to some extent the series.

Katich was run out by Jonathan Trott off the fourth ball of the match. James Anderson then dismissed Ricky Ponting next ball and Australia’s 245 proved entirely inadequate as England racked up 620-5 en route to an innings victory.

5. Sohag Gazi, Bangladesh

What of the bowlers though? Where a bad final match for a batter is over in the blink of an eye, there is something uniquely grim about the equivalent experience for a Test bowler.

In February 2014, Sohag Gazi went into what would be his final Test having taken 2-207 across his previous two matches. He duly returned figures of 1-181 off 48 overs in the first innings and 1-87 off 18.5 overs in the second. Rather capping things off, on a pitch on which Kumar Sangakkara was able to make 424 runs on his own, Gazi batted once and made a golden duck.

6. Arshad Ayub, India

Gazi did at least take a wicket though. In December 1989, Indian off-spinner Arshad Ayub trunded in for 0-182 from 49 overs against Pakistan. That performance came after returns of 0-81 and 0-37 in his penultimate Test.

7. Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, Australia

As poor final Tests go, Chuck Fleetwood-Smith’s is perhaps the benchmark. His innings figures of 1-298 in England’s 903-7 declared remain the most expensive in Test history.

There’s a dash of batting to throw into the mix too, as you’d expect from a man who supposedly once said, “If you can’t be the best batsman in the world, you might as well be the worst.”

Fleetwood-Smith was the last man dismissed in Australia’s second innings when England secured victory by an innings and 579 runs. He made a duck.

8. Denis Compton

Compton’s final Test was the fifth Test against South Africa at Port Elizabeth in 1957. While he finished his career with an average of over 50, Compton made a two-ball duck in the first innings and 5 in the second innings.

That would be pretty bad in itself, but it was only really in keeping with a much broader downer. Defeat meant a tied series after England had won the first two Tests and drawn the third, and this match in particular was a weird combination of dreariness and farce. The pitch had been relaid with soil from Durban but it hadn’t properly settled and this meant the action was defined by a great many grub-hunters and pea-rollers. This resulted in the slowest Test in history with a scoring at a rate of 1.40 runs per six balls (538 runs from 287.5 eight-ball overs).

A blaze of glory? Denis Compton went out in a blaze of, “Ah stuff this, there must be something better I could be doing with my life.”

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We don’t write about wicketkeepers very much and that’s wrong. Batsmen and bowlers aren’t the only ones deserving of our attention. Squatters have rights too. This article is about the select band of stumpers who have averaged more than two dismissals an innings in Tests.

Wicketkeepers who’ve taken two dismissals an innings and over. It’s not many, you know. If we limit ourselves to guys who’ve played at least 20 Tests so that we can rule out Steve Rhodes, we’re left with just six men and also Brad Haddin.

(Somewhat surprisingly, Rishabh Pant tops the list if we relax the qualification to 10 Tests. Pant averages 2.346 dismissals per innings. This is maybe just a reflection of the fact that teams are being bowled out more often at the minute.)

So who was the busiest?

Let’s rank them in reverse order. (A small amount of weight has also been given to matches played, but we’re not saying how much because you’ll only find fault with how we’ve chosen to do this. This website is not about transparency; it is about unnecessarily laying into Brad Haddin.)

Courtney Browne, West Indies – 20 Tests and 2.250 dismissals per innings

Courtney Browne is a cricketer who crops up in almost no lists for anything. If David Dunn is the antithesis of brittle-boned Mr Glass, Browne is the man who balances out Vinoo Mankad – who crops up so regularly he’s now even managed to get a mention in an article about wicketkeepers.

Three facts about Courtney Browne:

1. He was born in Lambeth in London
2. He won the 2004 Champions Trophy for the West Indies, making 35 not out in the final batting at nine, but nobody really remembers
3. He made his Test debut because Junior Murray had the wild shits the night before. Richie Richardson said Murray’s decision was “a bit disappointing” which tells us that Richardson has never once suffered the wild shits

Pretty much the first thing Browne did as a Test cricketer was drop Steve Waugh on 42.

Waugh made 200.

During his career, Browne mostly kept wicket to Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Ian Bishop. This explains why he took catches so often.

He also took all of two stumpings: one off Jimmy Adams and one off Chris Gayle.

Geraint Jones, England – 34 Tests and 2.015 dismissals per innings

Underlining the fact that it pays to keep wicket to good bowlers, Geraint Jones timed his career to precisely coincide with a bunch of quicks who we don’t even need to name and also Liam Plunkett.

Jones was born in Papua New Guinea, so he and Browne encourage the theory that you need to have been born in a different country than the one you play international cricket for to be involved in more than two dismissals per Test innings.

This is not a very catchily-worded theory, so hopefully it will be swiftly disproven.

As well as 128 catches – including one biggie that should really count for at least 100 on its own – Jones took five stumpings: two off Monty Panesar and three off Ashley Giles.

The Giles ones included two in one innings. They were an elite pair: Tino Best and Pedro Collins.

Collins had made two runs in an hour.

It was a great Test match. Rob Key made 221 in it.

Brad Haddin, Australia – 66 Tests and 2.109 dismissals per innings

Brad Haddin was born in Australia so there’s an end to the ‘born in a different country’ theory and there’s yet another thing that Brad Haddin has ruined.

We weren’t quite sure whether to have Braddin (Braddin? What the hell? How did we only write that for the first time by accident?) or Quinton de Kock next in our list. Then we remembered that in any situation where you can diminish Haddin’s achievements, you should always do so.

Haddin took 262 catches and we don’t care enough about him to check who they were off. He managed only eight stumpings in all those Tests as well, which is, quite frankly, feeble – just like Brad Haddin himself.

Quinton de Kock, South Africa – 47 Tests and 2.321 dismissals per innings

The way that we see it, Quinton de Kock has got three things right.

1. He didn’t play any Tests in the flat pitch era
2. He’s kept wicket to Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander, Morne Morkel and Kagiso Rabada
3. He’s kept wicket on the kinds of home pitches you’d definitely want to play on if you had access to the bowlers listed above

As well as 191 catches, De Kock has also taken 11 stumpings. These were mostly off Keshav Maharaj, but also off JP Duminy, Stiaan van Zyl and Tabraiz Shamsi.

Adam Gilchrist, Australia – 96 Tests and 2.178 dismissals per innings

If you look at all of the wicketkeepers – all of them – then Adam Gilchrist is the best batsman.

That’s what Gilchrist known for. Even if you set aside all of the hundreds and World Cup wins, he is probably one of the finest purveyors of the off-larrup there’s ever been. He could be remembered for that alone.

Larrup.

But Gilchrist was also quite a busy keeper. He kept to Shane Warne, after all. His 37 stumpings piss all over these other guys’ efforts from a very great height.

What sort of height? Using the correct units of measurement for height, Adam Gilchrist’s number of stumpings piss all over everyone else’s numbers of stumpings from a height of one Eiffel Tower and six double-decker buses.

Tim Paine, Australia – 31 Tests and 2.333 dismissals per innings

Tim Paine has the greatest number of dismissals per innings of wicketkeepers who meet our 20-Test qualification criterion.

This is somewhat disappointing.

It’s surprising too – but mostly it’s disappointing.

Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon comprise a handy attack and most of Paine’s busiest keeping days have come when all four have been in the team.

11 times he’s netted four or five victims in an innings and on six of those occasions, all four of those bowlers have been playing. Considering Australia fairly regularly throw in a James Pattinson or a Peter Siddle, that’s really rather striking.

Tim Paine isn’t Test cricket’s busiest wicketkeeper though.

Kamran Akmal, Pakistan – 53 Tests and 2.080 dismissals per innings

First things first: what the holy ballbags? Kamran Akmal has snuck into an elite wicketkeeper bracket? Have we gone number-blind or number-dumb or something?

Second things second: you’re waiting for an explanation of how Kamran Akmal is a busier wicketkeeper than all the guys above.

That’s easy.

Kamran Akmal is not what you’d call a safe pair of hands. There are times when it actually seems like he is not the owner of hands at all.

When he dropped Ross Taylor twice on the way to a hundred in 2011, we wondered whether he actually had footballs made of ice on the ends of his arms. It seemed to make more sense.

Then there was that time he was only prevented from dropping Mike Hussey a fourth, fifth and sixth time by Australia drawing proceedings to a close by winning the game.

We have to factor this in.

Imagine that Kamran Akmal secures two dismissals in an innings. Now imagine how many chances he must have been presented with for those two dismissals to have ensued.

It’s a lot, isn’t it?

If Kamran Akmal secured on average two dismissals an innings for his entire 53-Test career, one can only conclude that he must have been by far the busiest wicketkeeper in Test history.

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If, as a cricketer, you’re going to be remembered for just one moment, you might as well make that moment the climax of the most exciting passage of sport many of us will ever see.

Even if it wasn’t the hardest catch, for safely taking it England fans will forever owe Geraint Jones a debt. We’re not saying he could get away with murder, but we could probably let burglary or hijacking a plane slide. Surely even Surrey fans wouldn’t begrudge his leaving cricket with a win in the domestic one-day final.

Not only did Jones top score for Gloucestershire on the day, he was also involved in the pivotal moment of Surrey’s innings. When Kumar Sangakkara slapped the ball to mid-on, Jones should have been there – but he was off the field having a slash. Will Tavare safely took the catch and Surrey promptly folded. With those utterly reliable hands of his, Jones probably didn’t even splash upon hearing the roar.