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Collapses

Five of the lowest totals in Test cricket, drawn on the same pair of axes: runs up the side, the wicket along the bottom. Each of these innings is charted inside its own piece. None of those charts can show you this.

Five famous Test collapses, fall of wicket A line chart of five low Test totals, showing the score at which each wicket fell. The horizontal axis is the wicket, one to ten; the vertical axis is runs, zero to 60. The sequences are: New Zealand 26 at Auckland in 1955, 6, 8, 9, 14, 14, 22, 22, 22, 26, 26; India 36 at Adelaide in 2020, 7, 15, 15, 15, 15, 19, 26, 26, 31, then the innings closed on 36 with no tenth wicket; India 42 at Lord's in 1974, 2, 5, 12, 14, 25, 28, 30, 42, 42, then the innings closed on 42 with no tenth wicket; England 45 at Sydney in 1887, 11, 11, 13, 13, 13, 17, 21, 29, 41, 45; Australia 60 at Trent Bridge in 2015, 4, 10, 10, 15, 21, 29, 33, 46, 47, 60. Every sequence was read off the full ESPNcricinfo scorecard. Third Man, thirdman.pages.dev, CC BY 4.0. Five famous Test collapses, fall of wicket Third Man https://thirdman.pages.dev/collapses Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 WICKET RUNS Australia 60 Trent Bridge 2015 England 45 Sydney 1887 India 42 Lord's 1974 India 36 Adelaide 2020 New Zealand 26 Auckland 1955 Open circles: the innings closed without a tenth wicket (absent hurt, retired hurt).
Fall of wicket in five famous low totals. Every sequence read off the full scorecard. Third Man, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

The record is not the lowest line

New Zealand's 26 at Auckland is the smallest total in the history of Test cricket, and it is not the lowest line on this chart. England at Sydney in 1887 is below it at four of the ten wickets, and India at Lord's in 1974 at two. What separates 26 from the rest is not how it began but that nothing arrived to stop it: New Zealand added twelve runs across their last five wickets, where England at Sydney found 32 and Australia at Trent Bridge found 39.

Nine wickets, not ten

Two of these innings ended without a tenth wicket. Chandrasekhar was absent hurt at Lord's and Shami retired hurt at Adelaide, so those lines stop at the ninth and the closing total is marked with an open circle. Drawing them to ten would be a small lie about how the innings finished, and it is the sort of small lie that gets copied.

Sorted by the total. Each scorecard was read in a browser, once, when the piece was written.
TotalSideWhere The pieceSource
26 New Zealand Auckland 1955 Twenty-six scorecard
36 India Adelaide 2020 The innings without a double figure scorecard
42 India Lord's 1974 Nine wickets, not ten scorecard
45 England Sydney 1887 Forty-five, and they won scorecard
60 Australia Trent Bridge 2015 All out before lunch scorecard

Using it

The chart is assets/test-collapses.svg, plain SVG with no external references, drawing itself in currentColor. The numbers behind it are assets/test-collapses.csv, one row per wicket, with the scorecard on every row so you can check any of it without taking this page's word for anything.

Licensed CC BY 4.0. More numbers on the numbers page, and the field is drawn to scale on the field.