Dale Steyn: the strike bowler of his era
For the best part of a decade, Dale Steyn was the fastest and most dangerous new-ball bowler in world cricket. Injuries eventually cut his career short of the records within his reach, but not before he had made himself the leading wicket-taker South Africa has produced.
A slow start
Dale Steyn was born in Phalaborwa, in Limpopo province, and made his Test debut for South Africa against England at St George's Park in Port Elizabeth in December 2004, taking 3 wickets for the match. His early years in the side were inconsistent, in and out of the team as he worked on his control, and it took a couple of years before the raw pace that had impressed selectors turned into the finished bowler who would go on to terrorise batting line-ups for the next decade. By the time his Test career ended, against Sri Lanka at St George's Park in 2019, the same ground where it had begun, Steyn had played 93 Tests and taken 439 wickets, the most by any South African bowler in the format.
Melbourne, 2008
Steyn's best innings figures, 7 for 51, came against India at Nagpur in 2010, but the performance most often cited as the moment he arrived as a genuine matchwinner came two years earlier, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in December 2008. South Africa were touring Australia, a side that had not lost a home Test series in more than a decade, and Steyn took ten wickets in the match, 5 for 87 and 5 for 67, as South Africa won by 9 wickets, part of a series in which South Africa went on to win in Australia for the first time. He also made 76 with the bat in that match, his highest Test score, sitting among his best five innings with the bat as well as one of the defining bowling performances of that tour.
Australia became one of his most frequent opponents over the course of his career, 15 Tests, 70 wickets, evidence of how often South Africa and Australia met at the top of the world rankings during Steyn's peak years. India, England and New Zealand followed closely behind in volume, each supplying between 50 and 70 wickets across the course of his career, a spread that shows Steyn troubled batting line-ups from every part of the cricketing world rather than feasting on any single weaker opponent.
How he bowled
Steyn bowled with a whirling, high-energy action and genuine pace, consistently among the fastest in the world game, combined with the ability to swing the ball both ways and reverse it with the old ball, a rare package that let him threaten batters throughout an innings rather than only with the new ball. His aggression on the field, celebrations included, became as much a part of his reputation as the wickets themselves. His five best bowling figures, from 6 for 8 against Pakistan at the Wanderers in 2013 to 7 for 51 against India in Nagpur, came against four different opponents, evidence he did not rely on a single weak opponent for his biggest hauls, even though four of those five spells came on home soil.
His best match figures, 11 for 60 against Pakistan at the Wanderers in Johannesburg in 2013, came in a Test South Africa won, part of a home series in which Steyn was at the peak of his powers.
He was also, in later years, a bowler who understood the value of the older ball as well as the new one, and his record at Newlands in Cape Town, his most-visited ground with 15 Tests, and at Kingsmead in Durban and the Wanderers in Johannesburg, shows how comfortable he was leading the attack in home conditions that were themselves quicker and bouncier than most of the pitches he encountered abroad.
Number one in the world
Steyn held the number one position in the ICC Test bowling rankings for a large part of his career, at various points the top-ranked bowler in the format for a combined total of more than 250 weeks, a period during which South Africa were themselves ranked the top Test side in the world. He was named South African Cricketer of the Year on multiple occasions during this stretch, and the archive shows him producing his heaviest output in the 2010s, 267 wickets across 59 Tests, alongside his best strike rate of the decades recorded.
Injuries and the long goodbye
A series of serious injuries, most significantly a shoulder problem sustained bowling in Australia in 2016 that required surgery, slowed Steyn's career considerably in its final years and kept him out of long stretches of South Africa's Test cricket. He never fully recaptured his earlier workload, playing his cricket in shorter bursts thereafter, and though he remained capable of matchwinning spells when fit, the volume of wickets that had once seemed a certainty, most notably Shaun Pollock's South African Test wicket record, which Steyn eventually passed, and Muttiah Muralitharan's world record of 800, which had always been a distant target, slipped further from reach the longer the injuries kept recurring.
The numbers
The final tally: 93 Tests, 439 wickets at an average of 22.95, with best innings figures of 7 for 51 and best match figures of 11 for 60. He took a five-wicket haul 26 times and a ten-wicket match haul on 5 occasions. His home record was especially strong: 261 wickets from 52 home Tests against 164 wickets from 37 Tests away, and his most productive home ground was Newlands in Cape Town, 15 Tests. South Africa won 48 of the 93 Tests he played, lost 24 and drew 21, and he also chipped in usefully with the bat on occasion, a top score of 76 against Australia at the MCG, though his 1,251 career runs were always a distant second to what he did with the ball.
Sources
- CricArcade Test archive: Dale Steyn's full career record and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Dale Steyn player profile and Test career statistics
- Wikipedia: Dale Steyn