Test cricket
The old men at the top of Test cricket
Australia won the Ashes at a canter last winter and finished the summer as the best Test side in the world. They did it with a team of men in their thirties, the same names in the same places, series after series, and almost nobody young enough to be called the future. The side that rules the game is the oldest anyone can remember, and it rules a game that seems to produce fewer great players every year.
A team this settled and this successful ought to be the product of a strong era. Instead it looks like the product of a thin one. Since 2023 hardly any batter, anywhere in Test cricket, has stood far above the others in his own matches, and the few who have are the same age as Australia’s veterans. Either Australia have found a way to turn age into a strength, or the field they are beating has thinned out around them. The ages of the Test XIs everywhere point to the second, and they say the same thing about every side, Australia included.
Are Australia really the best side?
Nobody should doubt that Australia are the best side. They are first in the ICC rankings on 126 points, and those rankings are built on results. They are first in our Test ratings too. Since the start of 2024 they have won 17 of their 23 Tests, with the Ashes the latest and loudest result.
There is a second way to judge a side, and it says something different: how many more runs per wicket it makes than its opponents in the same Tests. On that measure South Africa lead since 2023, at 36% more runs per wicket than their opponents, and Australia sit behind them on 23%, level with New Zealand. The two measures agree on the salient point. No side stands far clear of the rest, and South Africa’s lead is the smallest by the top side of any four-year spell since 1995 to 1998.
Earlier Australian sides were a different matter. Steve Waugh’s side of 1999 to 2002 won 74% of its Tests and made 55% more runs per wicket than its opponents, and the side of 2019 to 2022 was almost as far ahead of the field. This one wins almost as often, 64% of its 36 Tests since 2023, but by far less. Those earlier sides led their spells by a street. This side’s margin is less than half theirs, and in a weak field that is enough to be top.
Where have the standout players gone?
The benchmark for a strong generation is 1999 to 2002, when Jacques Kallis, Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist were all in their pomp. The fair test of any era is how far its best players stood above the others in the same Tests, on the same pitches with the same ball. By that test, nine of the 81 leading batters of 1999 to 2002 were making half as much again as the batters around them, and those five were among the nine. Since 2023 the count is four of 67, the fewest of any spell since 1995 to 1998.
The four are Temba Bavuma, Rachin Ravindra, Kane Williamson and Joe Root. Bavuma, Williamson and Root were all born in 1990, and Ravindra, at 26, is the only one under 30. Williamson retired from international cricket in June 2026, midway through New Zealand’s series in England, so the group is already down to three. The bowlers tell the same story. Since 2023 only five of the 38 bowlers with 40 wickets have been far cheaper than the other bowlers in their Tests, against seven of 42 in 2019 to 2022, and none of the five, from Jasprit Bumrah to Josh Hazlewood, is under 30.
Why the XIs keep getting older
The age of the Test XIs follows from that shortage. Test XIs since 2023 have averaged 30.2 years, against 27.8 in 1999 to 2002. No four-year spell since 1947 to 1950 has fielded older sides. With few outstanding players and few young ones good enough to take their places, the established players keep them for longer. The corollary is a game full of men in their thirties, and that is a problem for every Test side, from Cape Town to Christchurch.
Australia are simply the sharpest case. When they named their squad for the first Ashes Test in Perth last November, Cameron Green, at 26, was the only player in it under 30. Their XI across 2025 averaged 32.8 years, the oldest of any Test side in a calendar year since England’s in 1946. Mitchell Starc has played all 23 of Australia’s Tests since the start of 2024. It is tempting to read that continuity as the reason they win. It runs the other way. A winning side keeps its places because nobody younger is forcing the question, so the same names turn up Test after Test.
Paradoxically, Australia’s own stars have come back towards the pack while the side keeps winning. Steve Smith’s lead over the batters around him has narrowed since 2023, and Pat Cummins is the starker case. The other bowlers in his Tests averaged 68% more runs per wicket than he did from 2019 to 2022, and only 16% more since 2023. A captain whose edge over the field has shrunk that far still leads the top-ranked side, which is a measure of how little the field has to set against him.
Pitches and the ball
Australia’s own players think batting has got harder, and they have a case. Hazlewood told Wisden in September 2026 that averaging 35 now might be worth 45 ten years ago because the pitches have changed so much. Smith said at a press conference in December 2024 that batting had been more difficult since the Kookaburra ball was changed in 2021. In Australia the figures back them. Across the 53 Tests in Australia from 2011-12 to 2020-21, batters made 34.9 runs per wicket. Across the 25 Tests from 2021-22 to 2025-26, that fell to 28.5.
Any criticism of today’s batters needs tempering with that. Yet the fall elsewhere is small by comparison, from 31.7 runs per wicket to 30.6 across the same seasons. So Australian pitches and the Australian ball explain the Australian part of the problem far better than the global one. Across all Tests since 2020, batters are making fewer runs per wicket than in any decade since the 1950s. Batting is harder than it was, and that explains lower averages everywhere to some degree.
It does not explain the shortage of standout players. A harder pitch and a livelier ball pull every batter’s average down, the home side’s and the visitors’ alike. What has changed is that almost nobody pulls clear of the batters around him on that same surface. A Ponting or a Kallis used to do it as a matter of course, in good conditions and bad. Today it has nearly stopped happening.
In Australia 29.8Elsewhere 31.3
Does DRS get the blame?
DRS arrived in Tests in 2009. The tidy theory is that the review handed umpires the confidence to give more lbws, and so tipped the contest towards the bowler. The dismissals say otherwise. In Tests outside India, lbws made up 17% of all dismissals from 2001 to 2008, before the review existed. From 2017 to 2026, with the review long in use, the share was 15.5%. Where DRS was used, the lbw share went slightly down.
The one place it rose was the one place without it. India did not use DRS in home Tests until November 2016. In those home Tests the lbw share climbed from 17.3% in 2001 to 2008 to 22.3% in 2009 to 2016. Whatever drove that, it was the pitches and the spinners, with the review nowhere near it. DRS can be taken off the list of suspects.
What T20 has done to Test batting
The rise of T20 shows up in Test batting in two steps, and they did not happen at the same time. The first step came between 2009-16 and 2017-22, when batters started getting out more often without scoring any faster: runs per wicket in all Tests fell from 34.4 to 30.3 while the scoring rate barely moved. Fewer matches ended in a draw, because fewer batters were lasting long enough to save one.
Then the tempo changed. Tests ran at 3.25 runs an over from 2009 to 2016, and since 2023 the rate has jumped to 3.6 without runs per wicket falling any further. Draws have gone from 24% of Tests to 9%. The way it works on the field is plain enough. The batters arriving in Test sides now have grown up in a format where the first duty is to score, so they take on bowlers earlier in an innings and rarely settle for batting out time to save a match. Today’s batters sell their wickets no more cheaply than the last group, but they turn the runs over faster and the draw has all but gone. The format has become harum-scarum by its old standards.
The deeper worry for Test cricket is about the players who may never arrive. Sachin Tendulkar won his first India cap at 16, against Pakistan in Karachi in November 1989, and it was a Test cap. A teenage prodigy then was picked for Tests first. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the next big talent in Indian cricket, was picked for India’s T20 squad in June 2026 at 15, the youngest player ever chosen for the men’s side, after his IPL seasons with Rajasthan Royals. His game is built for T20, and whether a Test career lies ahead of him nobody yet knows. With franchise pay on offer, a young player today may want to be the next Chris Gayle more than the next Joe Root. Is this a sign of things to come, a future in which Test cricket is no longer the pinnacle every young cricketer grows up aiming for?
Verdict
The ages give the answer. So few younger players are coming through and putting their hands up that the established ones keep their places, in Australia and everywhere else. Australia’s side is the best in the world because the queue behind it is empty, and that empty queue, in every Test nation, is the problem Test cricket has to solve.