James Faulkner: One Season, and the Four That Followed

James Faulkner was Player of the Match in a World Cup final. He took three wickets for 36 as Australia won the 2015 tournament on their own ground, in the biggest match of his life, aged 24. Two and a half years later he had played his last international.

Careers that end at 27 are usually ended by injury or by a single collapse in form. Faulkner's is more interesting than that, because the decline is spread across four seasons and visible in every column. He is a rare case of a good cricketer whose peak and whose descent are both cleanly measurable, and the measurement says something worth saying about how narrow a white-ball specialist's margins actually are.

2013, which was the whole peak

In the 2013 season of the Indian Premier League, playing for Rajasthan Royals, Faulkner took 28 wickets from 379 deliveries at an average of 15.25 and an economy rate of 6.76 — figures computed from the ball-by-ball archive of every IPL match played through the 2026 season. At the time it was the third-largest haul in a single edition.

An economy rate of 6.76 for a bowler taking wickets at 15 is the combination every franchise is looking for and almost nobody produces. He took two five-wicket hauls that season, both against Sunrisers Hyderabad: 5 for 20 at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in April and 5 for 16 at Uppal in May. Two five-fors in a season against the same opponents, in a competition where five-wicket hauls are genuinely rare, is the sort of run that makes a reputation permanent.

The same year he made his Test debut in the Ashes, in August, and took six wickets in the one match he played. He was 23, an all-rounder who bowled left-arm over at a useful pace, batted with real power, and had just been the outstanding bowler in a T20 season. Everything about the profile said the next decade was settled.

The reason it worked

Faulkner's method was built on two things that suited the death overs precisely. The first was the angle: a left-arm bowler who goes across the right-hander and can straighten it is difficult to hit through the leg side, which is where a batter at the death most wants to hit. The second was a slower ball he bowled well and hid well, in the period when the change-up was becoming the standard death delivery rather than an occasional trick.

His career phase split shows exactly where he was used.

Phase	Balls	Runs	Wkts	Econ	Avg
Overs 1-6	371	482	16	7.80	30.12
Overs 7-15	400	539	13	8.08	41.46
Overs 16-20	467	778	32	10.00	24.31

Thirty-two of his 61 IPL wickets came in the last five overs. The economy rate of exactly ten in that phase is what the career-level numbers punish him for, and it is considerably worse than the death figures of Chris Morris or Dwayne Bravo, the two bowlers his role most resembles. The middle-overs average of 41.46 confirms he was not a bowler who could be used generally; when he bowled outside his phase, he was ordinary.

The finishing, which was genuinely good

The batting half of the profile was not decoration. He made 1,032 one-day international runs at 34.40 — a batting average above 34 from a man who came in at seven or eight is a strong figure, and it is built on completed chases rather than accumulation.

The innings that established it came against England in the 2013-14 season, when Australia needed 57 from the last six overs and he made 55, finishing the match with three balls to spare. That is the kind of innings that gets a player labelled a finisher for life, and in his case the label was earned: 96 ODI wickets at the same time made him one of the more genuinely balanced white-ball all-rounders of the period.

In the IPL he made 527 runs at 20.27 and a strike rate of 136.88, with 439 of those runs coming in the last five overs at a rate around 157. Useful, in a small sample, and not what he was bought for.

The decline, season by season

This is where the career becomes unusual. Most players fade. Faulkner's numbers fell off a step and then kept falling.

Season	Franchise	Balls	Wkts	Econ	Avg
2013	Rajasthan Royals	379	28	6.76	15.25
2014	Rajasthan Royals	264	11	9.75	39.00
2015	Rajasthan Royals	270	8	9.47	53.25
2016	Gujarat Lions	102	2	9.82	83.50
2017	Gujarat Lions	163	8	9.90	33.62

The economy rate goes from 6.76 to above 9.4 in a single year and never comes back. Twenty-eight wickets become eleven, then eight, then two. Across the four seasons after his peak he took 29 wickets at an average above 44, which is not a franchise bowler's record.

Some of this is the competition. IPL scoring rates rose through that period and every death bowler got more expensive. But not by three runs an over in twelve months, and not while their strike rate halved. Something specific went wrong.

The plausible explanation, and it is the one his own account supports, is physical. Faulkner had a run of injuries in the middle of the decade, including knee trouble that cost him significant cricket, and his method had no margin for a lost yard of pace. A left-arm death bowler whose slower ball is his main wicket-taking option needs the stock ball to be quick enough to make the slower one deceptive. Take two or three miles an hour off the fast one and the difference between the two closes, and the batter has time. That is the whole of his problem in one sentence, and it is why the collapse shows in the economy rate before it shows in the wickets.

The Australia career, and the depth problem

His international record reads: one Test, six wickets; 69 ODIs, 96 wickets and 1,032 runs at 34.40; 24 T20 internationals, 36 wickets. He last played for Australia in October 2017, aged 27.

The single Test is partly about the same thing that limited Chris Morris in South Africa — a national side with a surplus of the exact commodity he offered. Australian cricket in that period had Mitchell Johnson, Ryan Harris, Peter Siddle and then Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood; a fourth or fifth seamer who batted usefully was not a scarce item. He was a white-ball selection almost from the start, and once the white-ball form went there was nothing else holding the place.

What the international record does contain is the World Cup final, and that should not be minimised because the rest ended early. He took the Man of the Match award in a World Cup final on home soil. A very small number of cricketers have that on their record, and no amount of subsequent decline removes it.

What the record adds up to

The honest summary is that Faulkner was, for about eighteen months, one of the best white-ball all-rounders in the world, and then for about four years a bowler franchises kept hoping would come back. Both halves are true and the second is longer.

The general point his career makes is about the fragility of a certain kind of specialism. A batter who loses a yard of timing scores fewer runs. A death bowler whose deception depends on a pace differential and loses a yard does not get slightly worse — he becomes hittable, because the entire method rests on a margin measured in fractions of a second. Bhuvneshwar Kumar survived similar physical trouble by having swing to fall back on. Faulkner had the angle and the change-up, and when the change-up stopped working there was nothing underneath.

He continued in franchise and county cricket for years afterwards, which is the normal destination for a player of that profile, but the international and IPL record stops where the pace did. Twenty-eight wickets at 15.25 remains one of the better seasons any overseas bowler has had in the tournament. It is also, unusually, the only season he had.

For the full season-by-season figures and career record, see the James Faulkner profile. The IPL phase and season splits here were computed from the ball-by-ball archive covering every match through the 2026 season, counting only wickets credited to the bowler; his Test, ODI and T20I figures are published career totals.