Five collapses, one line

Five innings on this site ended below 61. New Zealand’s 26 at Auckland in 1955, India’s 36 at Adelaide in 2020 and 42 at Lord’s in 1974, England’s 45 at Sydney in 1887, Australia’s 60 at Trent Bridge in 2015. Each has its own piece. This one puts their fall-of-wickets lines side by side.

Read that way, the order changes.

Five wickets down

At the fall of the fifth wicket the five innings stood at 13, 14, 15, 21 and 25. The worst of them is not Auckland. It is Sydney in 1887, where England were 13 for five and three of the wickets fell without the score moving.

Auckland was 14 for five. Adelaide was 15 for five, and there the four wickets from the second to the fifth all fell at 15, with no runs at all between them. Trent Bridge was 21 for five after four overs and one ball. Lord’s, the innings that finished on 42, was 25 for five and was in the best position of the lot.

The stretch without a run

Every one of the five has a passage where wickets fell and the score did not move. Adelaide: four wickets at 15. Sydney: three at 13. Auckland: three at 22. Lord’s: two at 42, at the end. Trent Bridge: two at 10, in the first two overs.

That is the shape a collapse takes on a card. Not a steady decline but a plateau, a score that sits still while the batting order walks past it.

Where 26 comes from

Auckland is the lowest total in Test history, and it is not the worst line. It was 14 for five, then 22 for eight, and the last two wickets added four. The innings lasted 27 overs, which is longer than any of the other four, and produced 26 runs. The rate was 0.96 an over.

Trent Bridge produced 60 in 18.3 overs, at 3.24 an over, and is the highest of the five. Fourteen of the 60 were extras, eleven of them leg byes. Take the extras away and Australia made 46 off the bat, which is closer to the other four than the 60 suggests.

Three of the five innings contain no extras at all. Auckland, Adelaide and Lord’s each read 0 in that column. Sydney had three. Trent Bridge had fourteen, and they were its top score.

Top scores

Nobody reached 20 in any of the five. Solkar made 18 at Lord’s, Lohmann 17 at Sydney, Johnson 13 at Trent Bridge, Sutcliffe 11 at Auckland, Agarwal 9 at Adelaide. Adelaide was the first Test innings in which nobody reached double figures, and it is not the lowest total.

Two of the five did not lose a tenth wicket. At Lord’s Chandrasekhar was absent hurt; at Adelaide Shami retired with a broken forearm. Both innings closed with nine down and nobody left to bat, so both totals are the score at which the side ran out of batsmen rather than the score at which it was bowled out.

What separates 26 from 60

Not the collapse. At five down, Auckland and Trent Bridge were seven runs apart. What separates them is what happened afterwards: Australia’s last five wickets added 39, New Zealand’s added 12, and Australia were given 14 runs they did not have to score.

The total is the number everybody quotes and it is the least informative line on any of these cards. It measures the tail and the extras as much as the collapse. The fall of wickets measures the collapse, and by that measure Sydney in 1887 was the worst start any of these five sides made, and England won the match.

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No. 6 in Collapse, a series of 16.

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