Greatest Australian Fast Bowlers: Lillee to Cummins

Every cricketing country has a national specialty. India produces batters who play spin as though it were a conversation. The West Indies, for two decades, produced fast bowlers in such volume that a great one could not get a game. England produces swing bowlers and arguments about selection. Australia produces fast bowlers with a stubbornness that has outlasted eleven decades, six state associations, two world wars and every change in how the game is organised.

The reason is not mysterious. Hard pitches with genuine bounce, a first-class competition played on them, a culture that treats the bowler who hits the splice as a national asset rather than a nuisance, and a Test schedule that rewards pace. What follows is a run through the bowlers who defined it, with figures drawn from this site's Ashes dataset where they help. Ashes numbers are used because they are the one sample every Australian quick from 1882 to the present has faced under comparable pressure.

Spofforth, and the template

Fred Spofforth was called the Demon before anyone thought to write down what fast bowling was supposed to look like. He was tall, hostile, and cleverer than the batters he bowled to, varying his pace deliberately at a time when most quicks simply ran in and hurled it. At The Oval in 1882 he took fourteen wickets in the match and bowled Australia to a win by seven runs, and an English newspaper printed the mock obituary that gave the Ashes its name.

The dataset has him at 59 Ashes wickets from 13 matches at 19.98, with two ten-wicket hauls. Everything Australian fast bowling has done since is a variation on him: aggression as a tactic rather than a temperament, and the willingness to bowl a spell that costs you something.

Lindwall and Miller

Ray Lindwall had the most admired action of his generation, low-slung and rhythmical, and he bowled a bouncer that was rationed rather than sprayed. He finished with 228 Test wickets, and in Ashes cricket alone the data has him at 114 at 22.44 with an economy rate of 2.28. Keith Miller bowled at the other end and did everything else as well, a genuine all-rounder who had flown Mosquitos in the war and treated cricket accordingly. His Ashes economy rate of 2.04 across 87 wickets is the sort of number that stops being about a bowler and starts being about an era.

Alan Davidson followed them, left-arm over, swinging it late, and his Ashes figures of 84 wickets at 23.76 with an economy under two runs an over describe a bowler who was almost impossible to score off. All three were products of a game in which a maiden was a wicket-taking delivery in slow motion.

Lillee and Thomson

This is the pairing every Australian over fifty will name before you finish the question, and the numbers back the mythology only partly, because the mythology was never really about the numbers.

Dennis Lillee retired with 355 Test wickets, which was the world record at the time, and did it across only 70 Tests despite losing years to stress fractures in his back and further years to World Series Cricket. In Ashes matches the data shows 128 wickets at 22.32 from 24 Tests, with seven five-wicket hauls and two ten-wicket matches. What made him great was not raw pace, though he had that early on. It was that after his back broke he rebuilt himself as a bowler of unimprovable technical quality, swinging it away, seaming it back, and reading batters with an accuracy that bordered on rude.

Jeff Thomson was the other thing entirely. A slinging, javelin-thrower's action that hid the ball until impossibly late and generated speeds that nobody had measured properly before and that terrified everyone who faced them. He took 200 Test wickets, and the Ashes data has him at 97 at 23.89. The 1974-75 series, in which he and Lillee took the great majority of England's wickets between them, produced the couplet that did the rounds all summer about what would happen to you if Thommo did not get you first.

They were not equally consistent. Lillee bowled for a decade at the highest standard; Thomson's peak was shorter and his body less cooperative. Together for two or three summers they were the most frightening opening pair the game had seen since the bodyline era, and the one modern Australian sides are still measured against.

The 1980s, and a run of specialists

The decade after Lillee is remembered as a lean one for Australian cricket, and it was. It was not lean for fast bowling.

Rodney Hogg took 41 wickets in the 1978-79 Ashes as a debutant in a side gutted by the World Series split, and his overall Ashes record in the data is 56 wickets at 17.00, the best average of any Australian since 1900 with 50 or more Ashes wickets in the list. Terry Alderman took 42 wickets in the 1981 series and 41 in 1989, doing it not with pace but by bowling a fifth-stump line and moving it just enough, and his 100 Ashes wickets at 21.17 include eleven five-fors from only 17 matches. That is an absurd strike rate of five-wicket hauls.

Bruce Reid was a very tall left-armer whose body kept breaking, and whose 47 Ashes wickets at 20.39 hint at the career he might have had. Merv Hughes was the opposite: enormous, indestructible, more skilful than the moustache and the theatrics let on, and eventually past 200 Test wickets. Craig McDermott bowled through the whole period with a red face and an outswinger, finishing with 291 Test wickets and an Ashes best of 8/97 in the data.

None of them played in a dominant Australian side. All of them would walk into most attacks in world cricket today.

McGrath

Glenn McGrath is the most efficient fast bowler Australia has produced, and possibly the most efficient anyone has produced. He was not quick by the standards of the men either side of him in this article. He was accurate to a degree that made pace irrelevant, hitting the top of off stump for eight overs at a time and then hitting it again after lunch.

He finished with 563 Test wickets in 124 matches, which stood as the record for a fast bowler for years. The Ashes data has him at 157 wickets at 20.92 with an economy of 2.70 and a best of 8/38, taken at Lord's in 1997. He also took 8/24 against Pakistan at the WACA in 2004 and a hat-trick against the West Indies in Perth in 2000. In one-day cricket he is Australia's leading wicket taker.

The thing that gets underrated about McGrath is that he was a planner. He named the batter he intended to dismiss before a series and then dismissed him, repeatedly, which is either the greatest bit of sledging in the sport's history or simply accurate forecasting. Michael Atherton would probably say the latter.

Lee, Gillespie and Harris

Brett Lee bowled as fast as any Australian ever has and took 310 Test wickets, but his Ashes record is one of the odder entries in the dataset: 62 wickets at 40.61 across 18 matches. He was a wonderful one-day bowler and, in the right conditions, unplayable in Tests. He was also frequently used as the enforcer in an attack where McGrath and Warne got the wickets, and the numbers wear that.

Jason Gillespie was the underrated one. Hostile, tall, with a beautiful action and a body that let him down repeatedly, he took 259 Test wickets and his Ashes best of 7/37 at Headingley in 1997 is one of the great spells of that era. He also, absurdly, made a double hundred as a nightwatchman in his final Test.

Ryan Harris played only 27 Tests because his knees would not permit more, and took just over a hundred wickets in them at an average around 23. His Ashes figures of 57 wickets at 20.63 are among the best of any modern Australian. He bowled every spell as though it were the last one he would get, which it very nearly always was. Peter Siddle, who bowled alongside him, has 80 Ashes wickets in the data and a reputation for turning up whenever the side needed twenty overs into the wind.

Johnson

Mitchell Johnson is the most extreme case of a bowler transformed by circumstance in modern cricket. In the 2010-11 Ashes he was so wayward that the Barmy Army wrote a song about not knowing which side of the pitch the ball would land. Three years later, in 2013-14, he took 37 wickets in five Tests at under fourteen apiece and physically dismantled the same England batting order.

What changed was a shortened run, a flatter trajectory and, above all, the decision to bowl short and fast at the body rather than trying to swing it. Left arm, round the wicket, at genuine pace, into the ribs on Australian pitches. Nobody had an answer. The Ashes data across his whole career shows 87 wickets at 25.81 with a best of 7/40, and the aggregate flatters neither the worst of him nor the best.

That summer is the modern reference point for what a fast bowler can do to a series in three weeks. It is also the reason Australia has never given up on raw pace even when the accountants of the game argue for accuracy.

Starc, Cummins and Hazlewood

The three of them bowled together for the best part of a decade and became the most balanced Australian attack since Lillee and Thomson, largely because they are three completely different bowlers.

Mitchell Starc is left arm, fast, and swings the new ball into the right hander at 145 kilometres an hour. His yorker is the single most destructive delivery in white-ball cricket, and he took 27 wickets at the 2019 World Cup, the most anyone has managed at one edition of the tournament. He has passed 350 Test wickets. His Ashes record in the data is 74 wickets at 27.45, which is the highest average of the three and reflects a bowler who buys wickets rather than strangles for them.

Pat Cummins has the best pure Test record of the group. He debuted at 18 in Johannesburg in 2011, took six wickets in the second innings, won player of the match, and then did not play another Test for six years while his back repeatedly broke. Since returning he has bowled at high pace with a wonderfully repeatable action and barely a bad spell. His Ashes figures of 73 wickets at 20.75 are, in this dataset, the best average of any Australian with 70 or more Ashes wickets since the nineteenth century. He then captained Australia to the World Test Championship and a World Cup, which is not usually part of a fast bowler's job description.

Josh Hazlewood is the McGrath role, and the comparison was made from his first season because it is obvious: tall, from country New South Wales, relentlessly accurate on a length just short of driving. The data has him at 60 Ashes wickets at 24.45. His value is that he allows the other two to attack, which is a contribution that never shows properly in a bowling average.

Bowler	Ashes matches	Wickets	Average	Economy
Glenn McGrath	30	157	20.92	2.70
Dennis Lillee	24	128	22.32	2.45
Ray Lindwall	29	114	22.44	2.28
Terry Alderman	17	100	21.17	2.69
Jeff Thomson	20	97	23.89	2.92
Mitchell Johnson	19	87	25.81	3.57
Mitchell Starc	18	74	27.45	3.30
Pat Cummins	14	73	20.75	2.83
Josh Hazlewood	14	60	24.45	2.98

Figures from this site's Ashes dataset, covering series to 2021/22.

The ones the Shield keeps producing

Australia's depth is the quiet part of the story. Scott Boland spent more than a decade taking Sheffield Shield wickets for Victoria before making a Test debut at 32 and returning figures of 6/7 at the MCG. His Test bowling average has spent most of his career in a range that looks like a misprint. Michael Neser has one of the best first-class records in the country and limited international opportunity purely because of who was ahead of him. James Pattinson and Jhye Richardson both had the ability and neither had the back for it.

That is the system working, not failing. Six states, ten first-class matches each per season, and a queue. The mechanics of it are explained in the guide to the Sheffield Shield.

So who is the greatest

If the criterion is sustained excellence across conditions and formats, it is McGrath, and it is not particularly close. If it is peak destructive force, it is Thomson in 1974-75 or Johnson in 2013-14. If it is the complete fast bowler, the one who could do everything and did it for a decade against everyone, it is Lillee, and most Australians who watched him will not entertain another answer.

The honest position is that they are not comparable. Lillee bowled to helmetless batters on uncovered wickets in the early part of his career. McGrath bowled to men with front-foot technique built by a decade of professional coaching. Cummins bowls under a workload management regime that would have baffled both of them. What they share is the thing this country keeps producing: bowlers who believe the ball is a weapon and the pitch is on their side.

More on Australia's wider record is in Australia's cricket team records, the summer's biggest fixture is covered in the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, and the player index holds career records for most of the names here. For the rest, start at the cricket in Australia hub.