The Australian bowling quartet of pacers Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and spinner Nathan Lyon made history on Friday as they became the first bowling quartet in Test history to take 500 Test wickets while playing together. The legendary quartet accomplished this feat during the first Border-Gavaskar Trophy Test against India at Perth. During the first session of the match, Hazlewood and Starc struck twice each, taking the wicket tally to the 500 mark. Australian media outet ABC Sport took to Instagram to reveal the statistic.
While playing together, Cummins has 130 scalps, Hazlewood and Starc have 124 each and Lyon has 122 wickets.
The quarter closest to them is England’s James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Ben Stokes, and Moeen Ali with 415 scalps while playing in whites together. However, only Stokes is the only active player in international cricket left now.
Based on pure numbers, Lyon (530 scalps in 130 matches), Starc (360 in 90 matches), Hazlewood (275 scalps in 71 matches) and Cummins (269 scalps in 63 matches) are up there as one of the greatest quartets in Tests ever, if not the greatest.
Australia’s best quartet in terms of Test wickets taken is Shane Warne (708 wickets), Glenn McGrath (563 wickets), Brett Lee (310 wickets) and Jason Gillespie (259 wickets), who all dominated the 2000s era of the sport and played 16 Tests together.
Coming to the match, India won the toss and opted to bat first. They ended the first session with 51/4 on the board, with Rishabh Pant (10*) and Dhruv Jurel (4*) unbeaten. Starc and Josh Hazlewood took early wickets of Yashasvi Jaiswal (0), Devdutt Padikkal (0), Virat Kohli (5) as well.
India (Playing XI): KL Rahul, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Devdutt Padikkal, Virat Kohli, Rishabh Pant(w), Dhruv Jurel, Nitish Reddy, Washington Sundar, Harshit Rana, Jasprit Bumrah(c), Mohammed Siraj
Australia (Playing XI): Usman Khawaja, Nathan McSweeney, Marnus Labuschagne, Steven Smith, Travis Head, Mitchell Marsh, Alex Carey(w), Pat Cummins(c), Mitchell Starc, Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood.
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