Modern clatter of wickets is an Ashes alarm bell

The Weekly Stat: In his fourth-innings century, Aiden Markram made 136 of the 240 runs made by all top-three batters in the World Test final, the first time in Test history that a top-three player made a 4th-innings hundred that constituted more than half the runs that both sides’ collective top threes made in the match.

Time, the all-knowing smugster that it is, will tell whether the 2025 World Test Championship final proves to be something of a turning point in cricket history, when a superb match and joyous occasion proved that the enduring magnificence and fascination of long-form cricket is both financially viable and spiritually necessary for the sport’s future.

The first half of the match involved the typically modern clattering of wickets, not unexpectedly for a game which: (a) took place in the 2020s, and (b) featured five of the current top seven bowlers in the ICC Test rankings. Both sides were bowled out in under 60 overs, an increasingly regular occurrence in Test cricket. It was the 29th time in 295 Tests since 2018 that the two first innings combined have lasted less than 120 overs, and the 11th in 65 matches since June 2022. Previously in the 21st century, this was a once-in-27-match occurrence. From 1920 to 1999, it happened every 45 matches, on average. It did not happen once in 259 Tests over 15 years from March 1959 to March 1974.

South Africa were kept in the game by the wicket-taking greatness of Kagiso Rabada, whose career strike rate, after a nine-wicket match, now stands at wicket every 38.9 balls. None of the other 374 bowlers who has delivered more than 4,000 balls in Tests has a strike rate below 41. Australia’s top three, as well as setting pre-Ashes alarm bells clanging in Baggy Green-land, made an aggregate of 49 runs, their lowest two-innings total in a Test match in England since 1890.

When they fell to 73 for seven in their second innings, the match tally stood at 423 for 27 off 138.4 overs – 15.6 runs per wicket, with a wicket falling every 5.1 overs. Then the mayhem eased into more old-school rhythms. The Australian lower order (including the longest 10th-wicket partnership in a Lord’s Test since 1969), and South African fourth innings combined for 416 for 8, in 123.5 overs, 52 runs per wicket, and a wicket falling every 15.3 overs.

It became the 26th Test (out of almost 2,600 played) won by a team whose successful chase was the highest of the four innings of the match, and only the fourth such game in England. Nineteen of the 26 have happened since 1997, in which time just under half of all Test matches have been played, perhaps highlighting how modern Test pitches often do not deteriorate in the way they once did.

Aiden Markram inked himself into cricketing eternity with a masterpiece of controlled positivity, against one of the great bowling attacks with a global trophy looming.

He is only the 15th player to score three or more fourth-innings Test hundreds, adding himself to a list populated by many of the all-time legends of batting – from Herbert Sutcliffe and Don Bradman, via Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting, to Graeme Smith and Kane Williamson. Markram’s was only the eighth hundred in a victorious fourth-innings chase in South African Test history. (Smith made four of the other seven.)

Markram’s Test career has been a living exploration of the brilliance and fragility of the modern-day multi-format cricketer, capable of scintillating boundary-pounding devastation, beset by technical vulnerabilities against the moving red ball, dipping in and out of long-form cricket when opportunities and selection allowed, unable to build on the promise of 1,000 runs and four centuries in his first 10 Tests in 2017-18, including two against the same Australian bowling attack he faced at Lord’s.

The skill-set of a 2020s batter such as Markram presents opportunities for bowlers, exploited by Starc within six balls in the first innings, but fiendish quandaries for bowling captains. Keeping fielders close risks concession of boundaries. Dropping them back, as Pat Cummins did in the 2023 Ashes and again against Markram, allows unstoppable accumulation.

Markram’s first 50 was the sixth fastest of his 21 Test half-centuries, at 69 balls, but contained just four boundaries, the fewest he has hit in the first 50 of a Test innings (the average Markram Test 50 had contained 32 runs in boundaries).

His century, reached with his 11th four, contained 19 fewer boundary-runs than the average in his previous seven Test hundreds. Thus he neutralised a 1,500-wicket bowling attack, and won that elusive trophy for his team (and ensured that the World Test Championship followed the men’s Rugby World Cup in having its first three editions won by New Zealand, then Australia, then South Africa).

Photograph by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images