Big four get through this season, but what of next?
For longevity and output, they have the rest covered, and are putting a break on the pack.
Australia’s four horsemen – Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon –are on the verge of getting through an entire seven-Test season unchanged, a remarkable effort in any summer but made all the more extraordinary given all are in their 30s.
Yet that is only the tip of the iceberg for Australia’s longtime Test bowling attack, which has no peer in its collective output. The 172-run win in Wellington was the Aussies’ 29th Test in which Cummins, Hazlewood, Starc and Lyon have played together.
They first lined up in the same Test XI in the Ashes opener of 2017-18, which was Cummins’ first on home soil after his more than five-year, injury-enforced absence from the longest form of the game.
In the 147-year history of Test cricket, only one other group of four players who would each eventually take 100 or more Test wickets have played more Tests together, that being Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad, Moeen Ali and allrounder Ben Stokes.
So when it comes to the four primary bowlers in a team, the current Aussie group is miles ahead of the next best: Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee, who combined 16 times.
Warne, McGrath and Gillespie also teamed up with Michael Kasprowicz in 15 Tests but the jostling between Kasprowicz and Lee highlights how unlikely it is for the same four players to effectively have a mortgage over the four bowling slots.
Other than when extra spin is needed in the subcontinent, and occasionally when Starc – as well as Hazlewood once in 2019 – has been left out in England have others been picked ahead of the group when all four are fit or not being rested.
While all four already have more than 250 Test wickets individually, Cummins, Lyon, Starc and Hazlewood are closing in on becoming the first quartet to combine for 500 wickets in Tests in which they have played together.
The Wellington wickets picked up by Mitch Marsh, Travis Head, Cameron Green and the run out of Kane Williamson by Marnus Labuschagne mean that 500 is just out of reach this week at Hagley Oval.
The big four sits on 479 together.
A closer look shows just how well they have complemented each other. The load has been shared almost perfectly. Cummins has 125 of the 479, while Lyon and Starc are locked on 119 and Hazlewood has 116.
The harder question to ask is whether the quicks will need to be rotated at various stages during the blockbuster series given how badly Starc, in particular, flagged by the end of the corresponding series in 2020-21, and to a lesser extent how Australia’s bowling performed as the away Ashes wore on last year.
But India will be a different proposition and could force tougher calls.
They are still the main four but not necessarily the always four.