South Africa vs Various
3 January 2013
Dale Steyn was known for his aggressive celebrations and confrontational send-offs, frequently getting in batsmen's faces after dismissing them.
England vs South Africa
1994-08-20
On August 20, 1994, after being struck on the helmet by a Fanie de Villiers bouncer, England's Devon Malcolm walked back to his bowling mark, said 'You guys are history' to the South African slip cordon, and proceeded to take 9 for 57 — the sixth-best bowling figures in Test history at the time.
Australia vs West Indies
1993-01-30
On January 30, 1993, Curtly Ambrose produced one of the great fast-bowling spells of the modern era — 7 for 1 in 32 balls — to demolish Australia from 85 for 2 to 119 all out in the Perth Test. He finished with 7 for 25; West Indies won by an innings and 25 runs to seal the Frank Worrell Trophy 2-1.
Australia vs New Zealand
1993-11-12
Glenn McGrath made his Test debut for Australia at Perth on November 12, 1993, replacing the injured Merv Hughes. He took 3 for 142 in the match — modest figures, but the start of a 124-Test, 563-wicket career that would form the spine of Australian cricket for the next 14 years.
England, West Indies
1988-06-04
On a damp Old Trafford pitch in 1988, Malcolm Marshall produced what many of his peers consider his masterpiece — 7 for 22 in 18.3 overs to bowl England out for 93.
India, New Zealand
1988-11-12
On 12 November 1988 at Bangalore, Richard Hadlee took his 374th Test wicket — overtaking Ian Botham as the leading wicket-taker in Test history.
England, West Indies
1986-04-15
Eighteen months after the 1984 Blackwash, West Indies repeated the 5-0 in the Caribbean, this time with the debutant Patrick Patterson making the Sabina Park pitch genuinely terrifying for England's batsmen.
West Indies, England
1986-02-21
Replacing the rested Michael Holding at Sabina Park in February 1986, Patrick Patterson took 4 for 30 and 3 for 44 on his Test debut on what Graham Gooch later called 'the only pitch I have ever feared for my life on'.
New Zealand, Pakistan
1985-01-25
An 18-year-old Wasim Akram, plucked from the BCCP nets by Javed Miandad, took 10 for 128 in his second Test against New Zealand at Auckland — the start of one of the great fast-bowling careers.
Australia, New Zealand
1985-11-08
Richard Hadlee took 9 for 52 in Australia's first innings at the Gabba in November 1985, the best single-innings figures by any fast bowler in the 20th century, and followed it with 6 for 71 in the second innings to set up an innings win.
West Indies
1985-06-30
Standing six feet eight inches, Joel Garner — 'Big Bird' — bowled the most accurate Test yorker of the 1980s, took 259 Test wickets at 20.97 and was the second pillar of Clive Lloyd's pace cartel alongside Malcolm Marshall.
England, West Indies
1984-08-13
Clive Lloyd's West Indies became the first touring side to win every Test of a five-match series in England, sweeping the home team 5-0 in a result that was instantly nicknamed the 'Blackwash'.
England, West Indies
1984-07-12
With his left hand encased in a plaster cast after a double fracture, Malcolm Marshall came out to bat one-handed at Headingley, helped Larry Gomes to a century, then took 7/53 to win the Test.
Pakistan, India
1982-12-30
Imran Khan's 8 for 60 in the second innings at Karachi headlined a 40-wicket series in which he averaged 13.95 — one of the most dominant individual fast-bowling performances in Test history.
Pakistan
1982-04-01
Imran Khan's first captaincy stint between 1982 and 1989 transformed Pakistan from a talented but inconsistent side into the team that would win the 1992 World Cup and dominate the 1990s.
England, Australia
1981-07-30
Set just 151 to win, Australia were cruising at 105 for 4 when Mike Brearley persuaded a reluctant Ian Botham to bowl. Twenty-eight balls and one run later Botham had taken 5 for 1 and Australia had collapsed to 121 all out.
Pakistan
1980-01-01
Through the 1980s, a generation of Pakistani fast bowlers — Sarfraz Nawaz, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis — perfected and exported reverse swing, the technique that would dominate Test cricket for the next two decades.
Australia vs England
November 1974 - February 1975
Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson together took 58 wickets in the 1974-75 Ashes, intimidating Mike Denness's England side into a 4-1 series defeat. Thomson's slingshot action — peaked at speeds estimated above 95 mph in primitive on-field measurements — and Lillee's mature pace and cut produced one of the most one-sided fast-bowling assaults in Ashes history. Five England batters were forced to retire hurt across the series; Denness dropped himself for the fourth Test.
Australia vs England
12-17 February 1971
England regained the Ashes after twelve years on 17 February 1971 at Sydney, winning the seventh Test by 62 runs to take the series 2-0. John Snow's 7/40 in the second innings was the defining performance, but the Test was equally remembered for the bouncer that felled Terry Jenner, the bottle-throwing crowd disturbance, and Ray Illingworth leading his team off the field — and for the Test debut, in the previous Adelaide match, of a 21-year-old Dennis Lillee who took 5/84.
England vs Australia
1968-06-01
John Snow of Sussex emerged in the 1968 Ashes as England's most genuinely fast bowler since Trueman's peak — a right-arm quick with a classical side-on action, real hostility and the ability to move the ball off the seam. He took 17 wickets in the 1968 series and 31 wickets in the 1970-71 Ashes, England's most famous series win in Australia in a generation.
Australia vs England
1955-01-05
On the morning of 5 January 1955 at the MCG, Frank Tyson took 6 for 16 in 6.3 eight-ball overs to finish with 7 for 27 and bowl England to a 128-run win over Australia. The 50,000-strong crowd witnessed the fastest spell of the decade. Tyson, nicknamed 'Typhoon' on tour after his vicious pace, ended the third Test with a haul that turned the 1954-55 Ashes and remains the best by an England bowler in Australia since George Lohmann in 1886-87.
England vs India
1952-07-19
On 17 July 1952 at Old Trafford, the 21-year-old Yorkshire fast bowler Fred Trueman tore through India's first innings to take 8 for 31 in 8.4 overs — at the time the best Test innings figures by an England fast bowler since Jim Laker's spin and the best by an out-and-out paceman in Test history. India were dismissed for 58 and 82 in a single day's play, beaten by an innings and 207 runs. Trueman's series haul of 29 wickets at 13.31 announced the most charismatic English fast bowler of his generation.
England v Australia
1948-08-14
On the first day of the final 1948 Ashes Test, Ray Lindwall produced what Don Bradman called 'the most devastating and one of the fastest spells I ever saw in Test cricket'. Lindwall took 6/20 in 16.1 overs, including a post-lunch burst of 5/8 in 8.1 overs, as England were dismissed for 52 — at the time their lowest Test total at home since 1888. Hutton's 30 was the only score above 6. The collapse set up Bradman's farewell duck and the series clean sweep.
Essex / England (cricket); No.12 OTU, RAF Chipping Warden (military)
1941-10-20
On the night of 20 October 1941, the England Test fast bowler Pilot Officer Ken Farnes was killed when his Vickers Wellington bomber crashed shortly after take-off from RAF Chipping Warden in Oxfordshire on a night-flying training exercise. Farnes was 30, had taken 60 wickets in 15 Tests between 1934 and 1939, and had been one of the few amateurs in the country considered the equal of the leading Australian fast bowlers. His death, just 11 weeks before Hedley Verity was wounded in Sicily, was the first major loss of an active England Test cricketer in the Second World War.
Australia v England
1933-02-28
Across the five Tests of the Bodyline series in 1932-33, Harold Larwood took 33 wickets at 19.51 — still the highest haul by an English fast bowler in an Ashes series in Australia. Including his unlikely 98 with the bat in his last Test, Larwood's tour was statistically the most dominant by a touring fast bowler since SF Barnes a quarter-century earlier.
Australia v England
1933-01-02
On 30 December 1932 at the MCG, Yorkshire's tall fast-medium bowler Bill Bowes, picked for England's Bodyline tour as Larwood's lieutenant, bowled Don Bradman first ball — a long hop that Bradman dragged on attempting to pull. Bowes finished with 1/50 in the innings; the first-ball duck is one of only seven in Bradman's Test career and has been retold in every history of the 1930s ever since.
Queensland v New South Wales
1931-11-06
On 6 November 1931 at the newly opened Gabba, the Indigenous Queensland fast bowler Eddie Gilbert produced a six-ball over to Don Bradman that the world's best batsman would later call the fastest he had ever faced. Gilbert clipped Bradman's cap, sent a ball over his head, knocked the bat clean out of his hands, then had him caught behind for a duck. It is one of the most discussed overs in Australian cricket and the central episode in the tragic, unfinished story of an Aboriginal bowler whose action was ruled illegal but whose pace nobody disputed.
Nottinghamshire and English county cricket
1928-09-30
Across the 1927 and 1928 county seasons the 23-year-old Notts miner Harold Larwood took 100, 138 and then 138 wickets — establishing himself as the fastest bowler in England and securing his place in the 1928-29 Ashes side that would, four years later, take its leg-theory plans to Australia.
Australia v England
1921-08-15
Through the summer of 1921 Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald operated as the most feared new-ball pair the world had yet seen. Together they took 46 wickets in the five Tests as Warwick Armstrong's Australians won the series 3-0, and inspired a decade of English broadcasting and journalism that would obsess about pace until Larwood's Bodyline answer arrived ten years later.
England
1913-04-01
Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, the amateur fast bowler, big-game hunter and Country Life writer, spent the 1910s in a near-evangelical public campaign to revive English fast bowling — arguing that the game was being dominated by spin and slow bowlers and that England would lose Tests until it produced new pacemen.
Australia, England
1905-07-15
Albert 'Tibby' Cotter, a stocky 21-year-old fast bowler from Sydney, made his Test debut against England in 1903-04 but became famous on the 1905 Ashes tour. He bowled bouncers as a tactic when most Edwardian fast bowlers thought them ungentlemanly, set packed slip-cordons, and broke stumps. He died in October 1917 in a mounted charge at Beersheba — the only Australian Test cricketer killed in the Great War.
Essex, Gloucestershire
1898-07-01
Charles Jesse Kortright of Essex was generally considered the fastest bowler of the Victorian era — quicker, contemporaries said, than Tom Richardson or Arthur Mold. He never played a Test, but his 1898 confrontation with W.G. Grace at Leyton produced one of cricket's most-quoted exchanges: when Grace declined to walk despite being plumb out, Kortright eventually uprooted two stumps and remarked, 'Surely you're not going, Doc? There's still one stump standing.'
Yorkshire and representative sides
1866-06-01
Tom Emmett of Halifax made his Yorkshire debut in 1866 and immediately announced himself as one of the most ferocious and entertaining left-arm pace bowlers in England. Combining genuine speed with an erratic brilliance — in an era before coaching had standardised line and length he bowled fast, sharp and wildly — Emmett was also one of Victorian cricket's most beloved characters, whose wit and personality made him as famous in dressing rooms as his bowling made him dangerous on the pitch.
North vs South
1857-07-13
The Nottinghamshire fast bowler John Jackson, nicknamed 'Foghorn' for the loud nose-blow with which he marked every wicket, took eight for 20 for the North against the South in 1857 and confirmed his reputation as the most prominent fast bowler in England. Jackson would become the dominant pace bowler of the late 1850s and early 1860s and the foremost roundarm 'demon' before overarm was legalised.
Nottinghamshire and All-England Eleven
1855-07-01
John 'Foghorn' Jackson of Bungay was through the 1850s and early 1860s the fastest roundarm bowler in England, a right-arm quick of exceptional pace and hostility. Playing principally for Nottinghamshire and the All-England Eleven, he took 796 first-class wickets at 10.52, a remarkable average for the era, and was feared by even the best professional batsmen for the speed he could generate on the rough, unprepared pitches of the period.
Sussex / All-England Eleven
1849-08-01
John Wisden of Sussex — five feet four and weighing under nine stone — broke into first-class cricket in 1845 as a fast roundarm bowler and within four years was a fixture in the All-England Eleven. By 1849, aged 23, he was being talked of as the most promising young bowler in England; the publishing empire and the all-ten-bowled feat would come later.
Kent and All-England elevens
1844-07-01
William Hillyer of Leybourne was Kent's leading fast roundarm bowler through the 1840s and one of the most effective in England, taking over 1,000 first-class wickets in a career that ran from 1835 to 1853. His high-arm roundarm delivery and ferocious pace on hard pitches placed him alongside Alfred Mynn as the most dangerous member of the Kent attack, and his appearances for the All-England Eleven made him known across the country.
Surrey and All-England elevens
1843-07-01
William Martingell of Nutfield was Surrey's leading roundarm bowler through the 1840s and early 1850s, combining pace with exceptional accuracy to take 762 first-class wickets at 10.38 — an average that ranked among the best in the game. An early member of Clarke's All-England Eleven, Martingell toured England's industrial north every summer and was instrumental in the AEE's competitive success against local twenties-and-twos.
Kent / All-England
1842-08-01
Alfred Mynn of Kent — six feet one and weighing more than twenty stone — was the dominant fast roundarm bowler of the early 1840s and the best all-round cricketer in England. His annual displays at Lord's, Town Malling and Canterbury, his peerless single-wicket record (he was champion of England 1838-46), and the carrying-off of his amputated leg in 1836 had made him the first popular cricket folk-hero of the Victorian age.
Alfred Mynn vs the North
1836-08-29
In August 1836, between his two thrashings of Dearman, Alfred Mynn played a single-wicket match at Leicester in which his right leg was repeatedly hit by fast roundarm bowling at the unprotected shin. The injuries festered on the long coach journey home and Mynn nearly lost the leg to gangrene; he was strapped to the roof of the stagecoach because he could not bend his knee, and surgeons in London debated amputation before saving the limb.
Kent, Players of England
1834-08-01
Alfred Mynn of Goudhurst in Kent — six feet one inch tall, eighteen to twenty stone in his prime, and capable of bowling fast roundarm at speeds contemporaries described as terrifying — emerged through the 1830s as cricket's first true giant. Nicknamed 'the Lion of Kent', he was the central fast bowler of his era, the pre-eminent single-wicket cricketer, and the figure around whom the great Kent eleven of the late 1830s and 1840s was built.
Sussex; Players
1830-07-15
George Brown of Brighton, often called 'Brown of Brighton', was reputed to be the fastest bowler of the 1830s — and possibly of the entire roundarm era. Stories of his pace bordered on the apocryphal: a long-stop wearing a coat stuffed with straw, a dog killed by a delivery that beat the wicketkeeper, balls that 'bounded over the spectators' heads'. Even allowing for legend, Brown was demonstrably faster than any contemporary.
Surrey vs England
1809-07-04
On the newly opened Lord's Middle Ground in July 1809, Thomas Howard of Mitcham took 9 wickets in a Surrey v England fixture and announced himself as the leading fast underarm bowler in the country — the first since David Harris's death in 1803 to dominate a major match by pace alone. His performance gave Surrey a rare win over England and reset the bowling hierarchy of the late underarm era.
Sussex vs Surrey
1804-07-30
George Brown of Brighton — who would later, in the 1818 underarm era, become the fastest bowler in England and the man whose pace allegedly killed a long stop — took his first major-match wickets for Sussex against Surrey on the Steine in July 1804. He took 4 for 32 in the first innings. The performance announced Sussex's first home-grown fast bowler and the future scourge of Lord's batters.