Eight for 15 at Trent Bridge
Stuart Broad played 167 Tests for England across sixteen years, and however his long career is measured, it will always include one spell: eight wickets for 15 runs in a single session against Australia in 2015.
The second Broad
Stuart Broad, son of the former England opener Chris Broad, made his Test debut against Sri Lanka at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo in December 2007, and went on to play 167 Tests, the last of them against Australia at the Oval in July 2023, a match he chose in advance as the end of his Test career, and one in which he announced his retirement to teammates on the morning of the final day. Across that span he became, alongside his long-serving new-ball partner James Anderson, one of the two bowlers most responsible for England's Test attack for the better part of two decades.
He bowled with a tall, upright action that gave him useful bounce even on pitches offering little else, and he developed a habit, well known to opponents by the middle of his career, of producing short, destructive bursts of wicket-taking rather than a single sustained line all match, a tendency that produced some of his most dramatic spells but also, by his own account, some inconsistency between his very best days and his more ordinary ones.
The spell
Broad's best Test bowling figures, 8 for 15, came against Australia at Trent Bridge in August 2015, in the fourth Ashes Test of that summer, and the number understates how compressed the damage was: Broad took his 8 wickets in a single spell either side of lunch as Australia collapsed from a solid position to be bowled out for 60, one of the lowest totals in Ashes history, inside a session. England went on to win the match and regain the Ashes, and the spell remains one of the most destructive short bursts of fast bowling in the format's history, still referred to in England simply as Trent Bridge 2015.
Australia were Broad's most frequent opponent by far, 40 Tests, 153 wickets, more than against any other side, a rivalry built across a decade and a half of Ashes series either side of that one session. South Africa and New Zealand followed, 25 Tests and 89 wickets against South Africa and 23 Tests and 94 wickets against New Zealand, both substantial tallies that show his threat was not limited to the old enemy.
The Broad-Anderson partnership
Broad and James Anderson opened the bowling together for England in well over a hundred Tests, the most prolific new-ball partnership in the format's history by matches played together, and the pair became almost synonymous with English seam bowling through the 2010s. Broad's other best bowling figures show the range of that period: 7 for 44 against New Zealand at Lord's in 2013, 7 for 72 against West Indies at Lord's in 2012, and 6 for 17 against South Africa at the Wanderers in 2016, each in a Test England won. His best match figures, 11 for 121 against Australia in the 2013 Ashes, came from the same rivalry that produced his signature spell two years later.
169 at Lord's
Broad was a genuine lower-order batting threat for much of his career, and his highest Test score, 169, came against Pakistan at Lord's in 2010, batting at number nine, an extraordinary total from that position in the order and one built in a stand with Jonathan Trott that dragged England back into a match they had been struggling in. Lord's was comfortably his best ground across his career, both with bat and ball: 28 Tests, 973 runs and 113 wickets, both his highest totals at a single venue.
A farewell of his own choosing
Few players in the modern game have managed their own retirement as precisely as Broad did in 2023: he announced on the fourth evening of the final Ashes Test at the Oval that the next day would be his last as a Test cricketer, then hit a six in what turned out to be his final Test innings and, once Australia batted last, took the final wicket of the match himself, closing his career with both bat and ball inside the same match. England won that Test by 49 runs to level the series 2-2, a fair reflection of a rivalry Broad had spent his whole career inside.
The numbers
The full record: 167 Tests, 604 wickets at an average of 27.68, with best innings figures of 8 for 15 and best match figures of 11 for 121. He took a five-wicket haul 20 times and a ten-wicket match haul on 3 occasions, and made 3,662 runs with the bat, including a highest score of 169 and a single Test century, the innings at Lord's against Pakistan. England won 76 of the Tests he played, lost 53 and drew 38, and his best decade by wickets was the 2010s, 403 wickets from 111 Tests, the years that included both Trent Bridge 2015 and the 2013 Ashes. His home and away splits both remained strong across his career: 398 wickets from 98 Tests in England against 186 wickets from 63 Tests away, and a further 20 wickets from 6 Tests at neutral venues, evidence of a bowler who adapted his lengths for slower, flatter overseas pitches rather than relying solely on home conditions that suited English seam and swing bowling.
He was also, across his career, a batter capable of frustrating opponents as much as his bowling did, and his 14 fifty-plus scores from the lower order, including the century at Lord's, meant England's tail was rarely as short as the scorecard alone suggested once Broad had a bat in hand.
His 604 Test wickets place him among the leading wicket-takers in the format's history, and combined with James Anderson's tally the two of them accounted for more than a thousand Test wickets between them across careers that ran almost exactly in parallel from the mid-2000s to the early 2020s.
Sources
- CricArcade Test archive: Stuart Broad's full career record and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: Stuart Broad player profile and Test career statistics
- Wikipedia: Stuart Broad