Australia's Greatest Test XI: The All-Time Side

Every Australian cricket follower has one of these sides in their head, and no two of them agree. That is the point of the exercise. What follows is my XI, with the reasoning for each pick and, more importantly, the reasoning for each omission, because the omissions are where these lists earn their keep.

The rules I set myself

Three of them, and they matter, because most disagreements about all-time sides are really disagreements about the rules rather than the players.

First, the team has to be a team. Eleven great individuals is not the same as a balanced side. This XI has to be able to bowl a side out twice on a flat pitch in Karachi and survive a seaming morning in Leeds. That means five bowling options and a batting order that goes deep.

Second, era is not a tiebreaker on its own. The modern professional plays more cricket, in more conditions, with better preparation and against more varied bowling. The pre-war player faced uncovered pitches and had no protective equipment worth the name. Both of those things are true and they roughly cancel. I have judged players against their contemporaries and given weight to the size of the gap.

Third, longevity counts. A player who was the best in the world for four years loses to a player who was among the best for twelve. Test cricket rewards the ability to keep doing it.

The XI

#	Player	Role
1	Matthew Hayden	Left-hand opener
2	Arthur Morris	Left-hand opener
3	Don Bradman (c)	Right-hand bat
4	Ricky Ponting	Right-hand bat
5	Steve Smith	Right-hand bat
6	Keith Miller	All-rounder, right-arm fast
7	Adam Gilchrist (wk)	Wicketkeeper, left-hand bat
8	Shane Warne	Leg spin
9	Ray Lindwall	Right-arm fast
10	Dennis Lillee	Right-arm fast
11	Glenn McGrath	Right-arm fast-medium

Five bowlers, a genuine all-rounder at six, a wicketkeeper at seven who could have batted at four for most Test sides in history, and batting that only properly stops at eight. That is the shape I was after.

The openers: Hayden and Morris

Matthew Hayden gets in because of what he did to opposition plans. He was enormous, he came down the pitch at fast bowlers, and he made the first hour of a Test match feel like an emergency for the bowling side rather than for the batters. His 380 against Zimbabwe at the WACA in 2003 was, at the time, the highest individual score in Test history, but the innings that make the case are the ones on turning subcontinental pitches, where he swept and slog-swept his way out of trouble that better technicians could not solve. He also formed a long and productive partnership with Justin Langer, which is worth something in a side full of individualists.

Arthur Morris partners him, and this is the pick I have gone back and forth on the longest. Morris was a left-hander of the classical school, the leading run-scorer of the 1948 Ashes series, and the batter Bradman himself rated highly among his contemporaries. His duel with Alec Bedser is one of the great sustained contests in Ashes history, and Bedser certainly got the better of it often enough. But Morris kept scoring, on pitches that were left uncovered and could turn lethal after rain.

The alternatives were Mark Taylor, Bob Simpson, Victor Trumper and Bill Ponsford, and I would not fight anyone who preferred Taylor for his slip catching and his temperament. Morris offers the left-right combination alongside Hayden and a technique built for bad pitches.

Three: Bradman

There is nothing to argue about here and pretending otherwise is a waste of everyone's time. Don Bradman averaged 99.94 across 52 Tests. The next-best career average in the history of the game is not close, and no other player in any sport dominates their field by a comparable margin.

The final act is the one everyone knows: he came out at The Oval in 1948 needing four runs to finish with an average of 100 and was bowled by Eric Hollies for a duck. That same tour produced the Invincibles, the side that went through an entire England summer unbeaten. He captained it.

He bats three because that is where he batted, and because a side with Bradman at three can afford to lose an early wicket without the game changing.

Four and five: Ponting and Smith

Ricky Ponting is the most complete Australian batter of the professional era. More than 13,000 Test runs, 41 hundreds, and a pull shot that he played to deliveries other batters were still deciding about. He was also the best fielder in the side he played in, and that side contained some very good fielders.

He is often held to a lower standard than he deserves because of the series he lost as captain. That is a strange way to treat a player who scored heavily in every country he toured across a career that lasted the better part of two decades.

Steve Smith at five is the modern pick and the one that will draw the most objections, mostly from people who prefer their batting to look orthodox. Smith's method is unrepeatable and slightly absurd to watch, all shuffling and fidgeting and bat-tapping, and it has produced a decade of run-scoring that only Bradman among Australians has bettered. His return to Test cricket at Edgbaston in 2019, when he made a hundred in each innings after sixteen months out of the game, was the single most impressive act of concentration I have watched from an Australian batter.

Greg Chappell was the man I dropped to make room, and I want to be clear that this is a genuine loss. Chappell was more elegant than either of them and better against extreme pace. Neil Harvey has an equally strong claim. On weight of runs across the widest range of conditions, I have taken Ponting and Smith.

Six: Keith Miller

Miller is the pick that makes the side work. Close to 3,000 Test runs and more than 150 Test wickets, bowled genuinely fast, batted like a man who thought the whole thing was a bit of fun and would rather be at the races. He had flown for the RAAF during the war, and his famous indifference to on-field pressure came from an entirely reasonable sense of proportion about what actually constitutes danger.

Without an all-rounder at six, a five-bowler side has to bat a specialist bowler at seven, and the whole structure gets thin. Miller solves that. He is also the fourth seamer in an attack where the other three are all-time greats, which means he can be used in short, hostile bursts rather than asked to bowl thirty overs a day.

Shane Watson and Alan Davidson are the other names in this conversation. Davidson in particular was a superb left-arm bowler and a useful bat, and if you want a left-armer in the attack for variation, he is your man.

Seven: Gilchrist

Adam Gilchrist changed what a wicketkeeper was for. Before him, a keeper who scored runs was a bonus. After him, every Test side in the world went looking for one, and most of them are still looking.

Seventeen Test hundreds from number seven, scored at a rate that turned matches inside out in a session. He reached three figures in 57 balls against England at Perth, which remains one of the fastest hundreds in Test history. His keeping was very good rather than the best of his generation, and this is where the argument sits: Ian Healy and Rod Marsh were both cleaner glovemen, and Healy in particular standing up to Warne was a specialist skill of the highest order.

I take Gilchrist because a wicketkeeper who wins Test matches with the bat from number seven is worth more than the handful of chances he might miss. He also lets the side play five bowlers without weakening the batting, which no other keeper in Australian history makes possible.

The attack

Shane Warne at eight. More than 700 Test wickets, the greatest leg spinner the game has produced, and a bowler who could contain and attack at the same time, which is the rarest combination in cricket. The ball to Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993, his first in Ashes cricket, has been replayed so often it has stopped seeming real. He is also a legitimate lower-order batter and one of the sharpest tactical minds ever to play for Australia.

Ray Lindwall takes the new ball. More than 200 Test wickets in an era of fewer matches, a beautifully economical action, and the outswinger that defined post-war fast bowling. He and Miller as a new-ball pair terrorised England either side of 1950.

Dennis Lillee is the second quick and, for my money, the most complete fast bowler Australia has produced. He came back from a stress fracture of the back that should have finished him and returned as a smarter, more skilful bowler than the tearaway he had been. He retired holding the world record for Test wickets. He would run through a wall for a captain and he made the crowd part of the contest in a way nobody has managed since.

Glenn McGrath is the eleventh man and the least glamorous selection in the side, which is exactly why he is in it. More than 500 Test wickets, taken almost entirely by putting the ball on a length just outside off stump for twenty overs a day, in every country, for fourteen years. Every great attack needs one bowler who never leaks, and McGrath is the best of that type the game has seen.

The captain

Bradman leads. He captained Australia without losing an Ashes series and his tactical record stands up, though he was not a warm leader and the players who did not enjoy playing for him were fairly open about it. Ponting is the vice-captain and would take over on the field if required.

If you want a different answer, Allan Border and Mark Taylor both have far stronger claims as leaders of men than as selections on batting alone, and Border in particular rebuilt Australian cricket from the state it was in when he inherited it. That is a case for a captain, not for a batting slot.

Who missed out

The honest list, because these are all defensible picks: Greg Chappell, Neil Harvey, Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Mark Waugh, Mark Taylor, Bob Simpson, Bill Ponsford, Victor Trumper, Ian Chappell, Michael Clarke, Michael Hussey, Rod Marsh, Ian Healy, Bill O'Reilly, Clarrie Grimmett, Alan Davidson, Jeff Thomson, Craig McDermott, Mitchell Johnson, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon.

Two of those hurt more than the rest. Bill O'Reilly was, by the accounts of everyone who faced him including Bradman, a phenomenon, and leaving out one of the two greatest spinners Australia has produced is only possible because the other one is Warne. And Steve Waugh's record in the fourth innings and in a crisis is better than the raw numbers of several players I have picked.

Cummins and Lyon are the modern quandary. Both have careers that stand comparison with anyone on this list, and in twenty years I suspect these XIs will look different because of it.

The side in practice

Bowl first if there is anything in the pitch. Lindwall and McGrath with the new ball, Lillee first change bowling short spells at full pace, Miller as the enforcer, Warne from one end for as long as he wants it. Slip cordon of Ponting, Smith, Hayden and Miller. Gilchrist behind the stumps, standing back to four bowlers and up to Warne, which he did perfectly well for Australia.

Batting, the top five would score at pace by the standards of any era, and the innings would accelerate rather than close down when the openers went. That is unusual and it is deliberate.

Have your own argument

Sides like this are worth building because the process forces you to decide what you actually value. If you weight peak brilliance you get one team; if you weight reliability you get another. Our Australian Test and one-day records are a reasonable place to check your instincts against the numbers, and the Ashes archive on this site holds the series-by-series history that most of these reputations were built in. Across 72 series from 1882-83, Australia lead England 34 series to 32 with six drawn, and 140 Test wins to 108, which is the tightest long-running rivalry in the sport.

If pace bowling is your bias, the case for and against several of the men above is argued in more detail in our list of Australia's greatest fast bowlers. If you would rather build your own side than read about mine, the Playing XI tool is the place to do it, and our player records will settle most of the arguments that come out of it. Then take the quiz and find out how much of this you actually knew.