One of cricket’s greatest feats may have happened for the last time

Simon Harmer has built a career on such deliveries: full, outside the left-hander’s off stump, spinning away and kissing the outside edge. But you suspect that this particular wicket, to dismiss Pakistan’s Noman Ali in the Test in Rawalpindi, felt different: it was Harmer’s 1,000th first-class wicket. He might just be the last ever to reach this figure.

Reaching 1,000 first-class wickets has always been a singular achievement. Yet, for most of cricket history, the landmark has been far from outlandish: far more common, for instance, than scoring 100 first-class centuries. While 217 men have taken 1,000 first-class wickets, just 25 have reached 100 hundreds.

When Mark Ramprakash scored his 100th first-class century, in 2008, it was widely said that he would be the last man ever to reach the landmark. The prediction has yet to be troubled: no man has even reached 90 since. When Cheteshwar Pujara retired in August, he had more centuries than any other current player: 66.

But while 1,000 first-class wickets have not historically had quite the same prestige as 100 first-class hundreds, the feat threatens to become as rare. Before Harmer, the last man to reach 1,000 wickets was James Anderson, in 2021. Only three other men have reached the mark since 2007.

Zooming out gives a greater sense of how much rarer membership of the 1,000-wicket club has become. The most common decade for players to join the club was the 1960s: 25 men took their 1,000th wicket that decade, calculates Kevin Jones, from the Association of Cricket Statisticians & Historians. Twenty or more players also reached 1,000 wickets in both the 1950s and 1970s.

The number of cricketers reaching the landmark has been in dramatic decline since. In the 2010s, just three players – Pakistan’s Danish Kaneria and the Sri Lankans Rangana Herath and Dinuka Hettiarachchi – reached 1,000 first-class wickets, the lowest in any decade since the 1860s.

Thanks to Harmer, the number of players to reach 1,000 wickets in the 2020s has now swelled to two. The number is likely to reach three: Sri Lanka’s Malinda Pushpakumara, who is 38, has 980 first-class wickets. But the next highest figure by a current active player is Nathan Lyon’s 847; Lyon turns 38 next month. Below him Pakistan’s seamer Mohammad Abbas, who is 35, is the only current player with more than 750 wickets.

In 1960, the start of the decade when the 1,000 mark was hit most frequently, sides in the County Championship played up to 32 games a season. From 1968, counties were able to sign overseas players, who could now play first-class cricket virtually 12 months a year. This helped a series of foreign players, including Garry Sobers, Bishan Bedi and Lance Gibbs reach the landmark in the following years.

Yet, at the same time, changes in the sport were already making the 1,000-wicket figure far more taxing for future generations to reach. The proliferation of limited-overs cricket, beginning with the Gillette Cup in 1963 and then extending with the launch of the John Player Sunday League in 1969, started to erode the quantity of first-class cricket played. By the end of the 1960s, sides only played 24 Championship fixtures, foreshadowing the greater reduction in matches that was to come. This year, county members were relieved just to keep the number of Championship contests at 14.

Fred Trueman, who took an extraordinary 2,304 first-class wickets, bowled more than 700 overs in a season eight times, and more than 1,000 four times. Such a workload is now impossible: not merely because of the pared-back schedule, but also because of how leading bowlers are managed. Central contracts – giving national boards control over their players’ workloads – have long been standard, with England belatedly introducing contracts in 2000.

Even if the first-class schedule ballooned, no leading player would ever again be permitted to bowl anything like as much as Trueman. Naturally, fast bowlers are managed particularly assiduously: of the eight men to reach 1,000 wickets since Andy Caddick in 2005, Anderson is the lone quick bowler.

The creation of Twenty20 cricket in 2003, and the proliferation of franchise competitions which began with the launch of the Indian Premier League in 2008, means that most leading bowlers now scarcely play any domestic first-class cricket at all. No bowler who excels in all three formats has a chance of making a push for 1,000 wickets.

Ostensibly, Harmer – a terrific spinner but not a bowler of the very highest rank – is a slightly curious figure to have reached the 1,000-wicket summit. In fact, Harmer’s journey shows the extraordinary confluence of circumstances needed to challenge the mark.

Outside England and South Africa, Harmer has never played a single T20 match; as an orthodox off-spinner, he is not sought-after on the franchise circuit. Instead, he has built his career around playing both the Northern and Southern hemisphere first-class seasons, playing for Essex in the English summer and then for South African sides in the English winter. Partly due to his earlier stint with Essex as a Kolpak player, during which he was ineligible for South Africa, and partly due to the excellence of left-arm spinner Keshav Maharaj, Harmer has only played 12 Tests.

Harmer’s 1,000 wickets are vindication for his outstanding career, and his rare dedication to the first-class craft. Yet, paradoxically, a landmark that confers a form of greatness will now forever be elusive for the game’s greatest bowlers.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]