Glenn McGrath and Damien Fleming sat down to rank their top five fast bowling pairs, and both former Australian quicks arrived at the same conclusion.
Before starting his countdown, McGrath handed out a few honorable mentions. He pointed to his own new-ball partnership with Jason Gillespie, which accounted for 484 wickets across 58 tests together. He also flagged India’s Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, who took 587 wickets in 58 tests, and Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan and Chaminda Vaas, who managed 895 wickets in 95 tests.
McGrath then opened his top five with South Africa’s Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock at number five. The pair played 47 tests together and shared 397 wickets, working out to 8.45 wickets per match. McGrath praised Donald’s raw pace and Pollock’s control, noting that Donald finished his career with 330 wickets and Pollock with 421.
At number four, McGrath picked West Indies duo Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, who played 95 tests together for 775 wickets. “When they were on fire, full and there was a bit of juice in the deck, they were nearly unplayable,” McGrath said. Walsh went on to hold the world record for test wickets for a period of his career, finishing with 519 from 132 matches.
Number three belonged to Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, a pairing McGrath admitted he included largely out of personal bias. “I wanted to put them up at number one, but I thought I’d be a little bit, you know, won’t be too biased here,” he said. The Australian pair played only 26 tests together but claimed 217 wickets between them, a rate of 8.35 per match.
At number two, McGrath went with England’s Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, calling their performance”a record that will be never be broken.” The pair played 138 tests together, more than any other fast bowling partnership in history, and shared 1,039 wickets at 7.53 per test. Broad finished with 604 wickets from 167 tests, while Anderson retired with 704 from 188 tests.
McGrath’s number one was Pakistan’s Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. “Wasim is probably one of the best, if not the best bowler I’ve seen or played against, I should say, in our generation,” McGrath said, pointing to Akram’s left-arm swing and Waqar’s reverse-swing yorkers. The pair played 61 tests together for 550 wickets, a rate of 9.16 per match. Akram finished his career with 414 wickets from 104 tests, while Waqar took 373 from 87.
Fleming largely agreed with McGrath’s rankings after running through his own shortlist of modern pairs, including India’s Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami, Australia’s Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood, and South Africa’s Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel.
He also referenced West Indies combinations from the 1980s, including Malcolm Marshall with Curtly Ambrose, and Andy Roberts with Marshall and Michael Holding.
Fleming placed Donald and Pollock at number five and his own partnership with McGrath at number four, joking about the overlap with McGrath’s list. He slotted Anderson and Broad in at number three and Ambrose and Walsh at number two, before settling on Akram and Waqar as his number one pairing as well.
