Root's maiden Test ton in Australia, Starc goes past Akram

All the stats from another notable day of record-breaking in the Ashes

04-Dec-2025 • 16 hrs ago

Joe Root and Jofra Archer added an unbeaten 61 off 44 before stumps, Australia vs England, 2nd Test, Brisbane, day 1, December 4, 2025

30 Innings that Joe Root took to score his maiden Test hundred in Australia. Only four players have required more for that feat - three Australians in Ian Healy (41), Bob Simpson (36) and Steve Waugh (32), and one overseas, Gordon Greenidge (32)

Root's 30 innings are also the second-most while batting in the top seven in an away country. Greenidge made 104 at Adelaide in 1988-89, in his 32nd and final innings in Australia. Rohan Kanhai also made 104 at The Oval in 1966, in his 26th innings in England.

135* Root's score on the opening day of the second Test in Brisbane. Only two England batters have recorded higher individual scores at the venue - 235* by Alastair Cook in 2010 and 138 by Ian Botham in 1986.

Root is also the second England batter to score a hundred on the opening day of a Brisbane Test, after Maurice Leyland, who made 126 exactly 89 years ago.

1 Number of scores higher than Root's 135* by England batters on the opening day of an Ashes Test since 2006. Andrew Strauss scored an unbeaten 161 on the opening day of the 2009 Lord's Test.

Four of Root's five Ashes hundreds have come on the opening day of the match, while all other England batters have collectively scored only three since 2006. Overall, he has 14 hundreds on the opening day of a Test match, behind only Ricky Ponting's 17.

418 Wickets for Mitchell Starc in Test cricket, the most by a left-arm pacer, going past Wasim Akram's tally of 414. Among all left-arm bowlers, only the spinner Rangana Herath (433) is ahead of Starc.

8 Number of wickets for Starc in the first over of a Test match, the joint-most by any bowler since the start of 2002, alongside James Anderson. Starc's 26 wickets in the first over of a Test innings are also the second-most since 2002, behind only Anderson's 29.

6 Pacers with six-plus wicket hauls in three consecutive Test matches, including Starc. He is also the first Australian pacer to achieve this feat and only the second bowler to do so for Australia, after Shane Warne, in 1994.

85.33 Average runs per dismissal for Zak Crawley while scoring 50-plus runs in a Test innings as an opener. It is the third-lowest among the 58 openers with 20 or more fifty-plus scores in Tests.

Crawley has converted only four of his 22 fifty-plus scores as an opener into hundreds. The only opener with a conversion rate worse than Crawley is New Zealand's Mark Richardson, with four hundreds and 19 fifties.

61* The partnership between Root and Jofra Archer is the highest for the tenth wicket in a day-night men's Test match. This is also the highest tenth-wicket stand for an Ashes Test in Australia since 1982.

The only other tenth-wicket stand of fifty-plus runs in pink-ball Tests was by New Zealand's Tom Blundell and Blair Tickner, who put on 59 against England at Mount Maunganui in 2023.

1 Prior to Starc, the last bowler who had taken six-plus wicket hauls in the first two matches of an Ashes series was Warne, at Brisbane and Adelaide in 1994-95.

Starc's 16 wickets in this series so far are also the most for a bowler across the first two matches of an Ashes series since Mitchell Johnson's 17 in 2013-14.

Joe Root Mitchell Starc Australia England Australia vs England ICC World Test Championship The Ashes

Sampath Bandarupalli is a statistician at ESPNcricinfo