Steyn vs Anderson vs McGrath

James Anderson

With 575 test wickets for England, Jimmy Anderson is the leading wicket taker in test cricket amongst his fast bowling counterparts, with only Muralitharan, Warne, and Kumble ahead of him in the combined overall standings. He is a magnificent bowler and one of very few that I have watched to ever really have the ability to bowl conventional swing both ways. Do not get this confused with Dale Steyn’s conventional out-swinger and his ability to get a wearier ball to reverse swing later in the day, James Anderson can quite literally opt to move the ball either way at will with nothing more than a subtle change in his wrist position. With the exception of Bhuvneshwar Kumar, I cannot think of anyone since Wasim Akram who not only had the ability to do it, but also the ability to control it and use it in such a way to take as many wickets as he has.

Regardless of his ability to chop and change between each delivery on a ball-to-ball basis, Jimmy is a lot smarter than that. He preferred his stock delivery to be the one going away from the batsmen, be it a left or right hander, to keep the outside edge in the game at all times. The change up was the one he would bring back into the pads which could either see a batsman being castled over or being trapped in front.

I would almost go as far as saying that Jimmy could probably have walked up to a batsman as he strolled to the wicket and told him, ‘listen mate, if I don’t catch your outside edge early on, I’ll be sending one back into your pads at some point in the next 8 overs to trap you in front or knock you over’ and the batsman would still not have been able to do anything about it. In my opinion, Jimmy is the most skillful of the three players but relied heavily on getting the ball to swing given his lack of pace and aggression as the spearhead of the English attack.

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Glenn McGrath

I have a theory that if I were to place a coin in a good area on the wicket, not too full, not too short and in that corridor of uncertainty, and if I were to tell every bowler who has ever played the game to run in and try hit that coin; Glenn McGrath would do it more often than anyone else. He was Mr consistency and led some of the greatest Aussie attacks for close to a decade. He didn’t have the swing of James Anderson, nor the speed and aggression of Dale Steyn, but he could hit that perfect line and length ball after ball, over after over, and spell after spell.

McGrath developed the ability to find the perfect ball to bowl, taking into account the conditions of the pitch, the overhead conditions, and more importantly taking into account who was at the crease and he would plug away in that area until he claimed his victim. As previously mentioned, McGrath was not a big swinger of the ball but maintained a very proud seam upon release of the ball which increased the chances of the ball moving off the wicket. Which direction the ball would move was as good a guess for him as it was for anyone else, especially the batsmen.

McGrath got himself very close to the stumps so that he was almost bowling in a straight line which meant that firstly, batsmen were forced to play at the majority of his deliveries and secondly, any movement off the wicket was more pronounced. The difference between the ball finding the middle of the bat and finding the outside edge of the bat is about 2.1 inches, and no body knew this better than the Aussie giant would search for those 2,1 inches of movement off a good length and would almost always get his man. Another strength of McGrath, one which very few actually mention, was his ability to keep a batsman back in his crease with well-directed bouncers. I think anyone who has played the game would agree with me that a well-directed bouncer at 125 clicks is a lot harder to deal with than some wildling spraying the ball in all directions at 145 km/h. He maintained a very simple strategy throughout his career, step 1, find ‘that length’, step 2, keep the batsman in two minds with well-directed short deliveries, step 3, wait for those 2 inches of movement off the wicket, and the rest was up to the keeper, slip cordon, and umpire.

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Dale Steyn

Dale Steyn in my admittedly biased opinion, is the hybrid of both Jimmy Anderson and Glenn McGrath, with a yard or two of extra pace on top. He was raw pace, aggression and passion at the beginning of his career but as he grew older, he really fine-tuned his skills and became one the most lethal fast bowlers of all time. Dale Steyn had the ability to produce a massive away swinger to the right hander and although he did not have Jimmy’s ability to move the new ball either way, he had the ability to get the ball to reverse swing at the back end of the day which made him exceptionally dangerous in ALL conditions, something one could argue Jimmy lacked.

To make things even more difficult, Dale Steyn would swing that ball in excess of 145 km/h with almost McGrath like consistency giving batsmen a fraction of a second to pick up the line of the ball, decide whether or not to play or leave, and to decide whether to do so on the front or back foot.

The angle of the delivery from Steyn’s release point forced batsmen to play at the ball and at the best of times, Dale Steyn could swing a ball around a corner which often left batsmen looking a bit silly after having looked to play a delivery through mid-wicket before having their off-stump uprooted by the brilliance of Steyn, which I’m sure Michael Vaughn could attest to.

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What do the stats say?

Trying to compare Anderson, McGrath and Steyn is no easy feat given that Steyn has played 56 fewer test matches than Jimmy Anderson, while McGrath started his test career before Steyn and Anderson knew which end of the bat to hold. I will try draw an apples for apples comparison between the legends by essentially ‘extending’ the careers of McGrath and Steyn to that of Jimmy Anderson's to create a ‘what if’ scenario. Is this full proof and 100% accurate? Absolutely not, but it is fun nonetheless.

If we assume that McGrath and Steyn played as much cricket as Anderson and they all bowled 32,359 deliveries, and we took into account the rate at which these bowlers took their wickets i.e. their strike rates, what would things look like? Well for a start we know Anderson bowled 3,111 and 13,751 more deliveries than McGrath and Steyn respectively. We know that on average McGrath needed 51.9 deliveries to pick a wicket, while Dale Steyn needed 42.3 deliveries to claim a victim. If we assume that both bowlers continued to take wickets at this rate, we know that McGrath would have picked up an additional 55 wickets, while Steyn would have picked up an additional 325 wickets, and things would look as follows:

The rate at which Steyn could pick up his wickets is something that hasn’t been seen in the history of the game and you would need to go back to the days of Malcolm Marshall and Waqar Younis to draw a relatively appropriate comparison. This is further evident in the fact that Dale Steyn, having bowled slightly more than HALF of the deliveries as James Anderson, has taken MORE 10 wickets hauls and almost an equal number of 5 wicket hauls.

To put the sheer devastation of Dale Steyn into perspective, he averaged 119 overs per 5 wicket haul while McGrath and Jimmy needed 168 and 200 overs respectively. To further emphasise this idea, Steyn averaged 620 overs per 10 wicket haul, while McGrath and Jimmy required 1625 and 1798 overs respectively. That would imply that Anderson would need to bowl nearly two and three times as many overs as Dale Steyn to pick up a 5 and 10 wicket haul in test cricket.

Had Steyn and McGrath bowled an equal number of deliveries as Anderson, their 5 and 10 wicket haul tallies would look like this:

Final Thoughts

If we ask ourselves what the role of any spearhead fast bowler is, I assume we can all agree that it is firstly to take wickets, and secondly to take those wickets as quickly as possible while conceding as few runs as possible. I think the stats speak for themselves, but ask yourself one question, if you were the captain of your side and you found yourself on the defensive and in desperate need of a wicket to change the balance of proceedingsand shift the momentum in your favour, who would you toss the ball to? For me, it's Dale Steyn each and every time.

Well played and enjoy retirement.