Allan Border: 156 Tests and a team rebuilt from the bottom
He took over an Australian side stripped of its best players and losing heavily, and stayed at the crease and in the job long enough to hand back a team that won. Allan Border played 156 Tests, captained a record 93 of them, and finished as the most capped player in the game's history.
Queenslander by choice
Allan Border was born in Sydney and started his career with New South Wales, but it was after he moved to Queensland that his career as an international batter properly took off, a switch that later became a familiar path for players looking for a settled first-team place. He made his Test debut against England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in December 1978, in the second innings of a rain-affected match, with an Australian side badly weakened by the defection of most of its leading players to Kerry Packer's rival World Series Cricket. It was not an easy time to break in, and Border's early Tests were played for a side well below full strength.
By the time the Packer players returned, Border had established himself as a gritty, technically sound left-hander in the middle order, and through the early 1980s he built the batting record that would make him first choice regardless of who else was available.
The job nobody wanted
Border was appointed Australian captain in 1984, inheriting a side in decline after the retirements of Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh within a single Test match, three players who between them had anchored Australian cricket for the best part of a decade and whose simultaneous departure left an obvious gap in both runs and leadership. He would go on to lead Australia in 93 Tests in the CricArcade archive, more than any Australian captain before him, winning 32 and losing 22. The job, when he took it, offered little glamour: a rebuilding side, thin depth, and years in which Australia was no longer the dominant force it had been through the 1970s.
The bad years
The nadir came on Australia's tour of the Caribbean in 1984, where a dominant West Indies side won three of the five Tests, with the other two drawn, and Australia never came close to winning any of them. The term "blackwash" belongs to West Indies' separate 5-0 sweeps of England in 1984 and 1985-86, not to this series, but the one-sidedness of the Caribbean tour was real all the same. Border's own record against West Indies over his career, 2,052 runs at 39.46 in 31 Tests, sits well below his career average against every other regular opponent, a reflection of how consistently difficult that rivalry was for Australia throughout the 1980s. He kept scoring runs through those years even as results went against his team, and it was that combination, consistent runs from the captain while the side around him struggled, that earned him the reputation for toughness his nickname, Captain Grumpy, was meant to capture.
The turn: 1989
The rebuild came together in England in 1989. Australia, given little chance by English critics before the series, won the Ashes 4-0, the first time Australia had won a series in England in more than a decade, and the result that marked the start of a period of Australian dominance that ran through the 1990s under Border and his successors. Border's own contribution with the bat that summer was substantial, part of a career in which he averaged more away from Australia, 56.57 from 5,431 runs, than he did at home, 45.94 from 5,743 runs, an unusual split for a batter of his generation and a sign of how well his technique travelled.
Headingley, 1993
One of the clearest examples of that away form came a few years later, in the 1993 Ashes, when Border made 200 not out at Headingley, part of his five best innings in the CricArcade archive alongside 205 against New Zealand at Adelaide Oval in 1987 and 196 against England at Lord's in 1985. By 1993 Border was nearly 38, in his final Ashes series as a player, and the Headingley double century showed that the batting had lost none of its authority even as the captaincy neared its end. Australia won that series comfortably, another mark of how far the side had come since the mid-1980s.
Border played his last Test in March 1994, against South Africa at Kingsmead in Durban, his 156th and last in the archive, then a world record for the most Test matches played by anyone, a mark that reflected both his durability and the sheer length of time he had spent as first choice for his country, from a struggling side in 1978 to the strong one he handed on in 1994.
An unlikely bowler
Border's left-arm orthodox spin was a part-time option for most of his career, but on a turning Sydney pitch against West Indies in January 1989 it briefly became the decisive weapon in the match. He took 7 for 46 in the first innings and 4 for 50 in the second, 11 wickets in the match, as Australia beat West Indies by 7 wickets, one of the more improbable bowling performances by a specialist batter in the archive, and still Border's best match bowling figures by a wide margin. The rest of his bowling career sits well behind that one match: 39 wickets at 39.10 across his 156 Tests, useful rather than central to his value, and mostly bowled to give his frontline attack a rest.
The numbers
The CricArcade archive, built from Border's 156 Test scorecards, records 265 innings, 11,174 runs at 50.56, with 27 hundreds and 63 fifties, then also a world record aggregate at his retirement. His most productive opponent by average was Pakistan, 1,666 runs at 59.5 in 22 Tests, and his best decade was the 1980s, 7,386 runs at 55.12 from 97 Tests, spanning both the worst and the best years of his captaincy. Adelaide Oval was his most productive home ground, 16 Tests for 1,415 runs at 58.96. Australia won 50 of the 156 Tests Border played, lost 46 and drew 59, with 1 tie, figures that trace the arc from a struggling side in his early years to the dominant one he helped build by the time he retired.
Sources
- CricArcade player page: full career record, best innings and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Allan Border player profile and Test career statistics
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: the 1989 Ashes and 1993 tour reports
- Wikipedia: Allan Border