Dennis Lillee: the model fast bowler
A stress fracture in his back nearly ended his career before it had properly started. Dennis Lillee came back faster and more complete than before, took 355 Test wickets for Australia and, for a while, held the world record for the most in history.
A fast bowler from Perth
Dennis Lillee grew up in Perth, on the far side of the country from the cricket establishment of the eastern states, a distance that meant Western Australian cricketers of his generation often had to travel further and prove more than their counterparts in New South Wales or Victoria to be noticed by national selectors. He made his first-class debut for Western Australia in 1969. He was quick from the start, with a long run-up and a high, side-on action, and by 1971 he was in the Australian Test side. His debut came against England at Adelaide Oval in January 1971, where he took 5 wickets in the match, an immediate sign of what he could do on a helpful pitch.
Within a couple of years he was the fastest bowler in world cricket and the spearhead of an Australian attack that had gone looking for exactly that kind of bowler after a lean run in the late 1960s. Then his body gave out.
The broken back
In 1973 Lillee suffered stress fractures in his back, an injury serious enough that some feared his career was over before he had turned 25. He spent months in rehabilitation, rebuilding his fitness from close to nothing, and returned to first-class cricket determined to bowl at the pace he had before the injury rather than manage a diminished version of it. He succeeded to a degree that surprised even his own team: within two years of the fractures he was bowling as fast as, if not faster than, before, now with a shorter, more economical run and an action refined by the long process of recovery.
The comeback became part of his reputation almost as much as any single spell: proof that the fast bowler's career, thought by many to be over, could be rebuilt through sheer application.
Lillee and Thomson
From the mid-1970s Lillee bowled in tandem with Jeff Thomson, and the pairing, referred to simply as Lillee and Thomson, became the most feared new-ball combination in the world. Lillee brought control, seam movement and a relentless accuracy at genuine pace; Thomson brought a slinging action and raw speed that batters found harder to pick up early. Together they underpinned Australia's dominance of England in the 1974-75 Ashes and remained the foundation of the attack for the rest of the decade, even as Lillee himself increasingly carried the greater share of the workload and the wickets.
The Centenary Test
In March 1977, Australia and England met at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to mark 100 years since the first Test match had been played on the same ground. Lillee bowled the innings of his career across the match, taking 6 for 26 in England's first innings and 5 for 139 in the second, 11 wickets in total. Australia won by 45 runs, the identical margin by which Australia had won that first Test a century earlier, a coincidence still widely regarded as one of the strangest in the sport's history. Lillee's figures from that match, both individual innings, remain among his best bowling performances in the CricArcade archive.
The aluminium bat
Lillee was as combative with the bat, and off the field, as he was with the ball. In December 1979, during a Test against England at the WACA Ground in Perth, he walked out to bat with an aluminium bat he had a financial stake in, rather than a traditional wooden one. The England captain, Mike Brearley, complained that it was damaging the ball, and after a delay the umpires asked Lillee to change it. He did so only after briefly refusing and, according to widely repeated accounts of the day, flinging the bat some distance in frustration. The Laws of cricket were amended not long afterwards to specify that a bat's blade must be made of wood, an episode still remembered as one of the game's more eccentric confrontations.
The record and the end
Lillee retired from Test cricket after the match against Pakistan at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 1984, his 70th and last Test in the archive, closing a career that had begun almost thirteen years earlier and survived a back injury many observers at the time thought would end it far sooner. At that point his 355 wickets were the most taken by any bowler in Test history, a record he held before it was later surpassed by Ian Botham and others who followed. The archive credits him with 23 five-wicket innings and 7 ten-wicket matches, and a career strike rate built on his best match figures, 11 for 123 against New Zealand in Auckland in 1977, and a best single-innings return of 7 for 83 against West Indies at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1981.
The numbers
The CricArcade archive, built from Lillee's 70 Test scorecards, records 355 wickets at an average of 23.92 from 90 innings with the ball. His most productive opponent was England, 167 wickets at 21.00 from 29 Tests, ahead of Pakistan on 71 wickets, though Pakistan cost him more per wicket, 30.44, than any other side he faced regularly; West Indies, by contrast, cost him 27.75 a wicket. He took more wickets, and more cheaply, at home than away: 231 wickets at an average cost of 23.73 runs each in 44 home Tests, against 124 wickets in 26 Tests abroad. The Melbourne Cricket Ground was his most-visited ground, 14 Tests and 82 wickets. He batted mostly at nine and ten in the order, a genuine tail-ender rather than a bowling all-rounder, with a highest score of 73 not out against England at Lord's in 1975 his only half-century in the archive, and Australia won 31 of the 70 Tests he played, lost 16 and drew 23.
Sources
- CricArcade player page: full career record, best bowling and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Dennis Lillee player profile and Test career statistics
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: the 1977 Centenary Test report
- Wikipedia: Dennis Lillee