Who is the winningest Test player ever?
Like most sports discourse, this one also comes down to what you value.
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Batting, bowling and all-rounder stats are updated as of Nov 10; all other graphs are up to date.
Viv Richards is one of the most adored cricketers ever. Listen to old fellas talk about him, and you’d think it was their first love, not a cricketer.
Mike Smith, was a tall, nerdy guy in glasses; earnest is the word that comes to mind. He was a top athlete, representing England in cricket and rugby. But he was not anyone’s idea of dashing, and no one was swooning over him.
They both had long Test careers, but Smith struggled to make the runs he did for Warwickshire; Viv smashed everyone everywhere and became a legend.
But by a twist of fate, the two are linked. Viv Richards had a win-loss record of 3.3, and England’s opening nerd was just behind him at 3.2. They are both winners, but they are not even similar in impact.
Smith played in 50 matches, missing more than 80. But it turned out that when he played, England won 16 and only lost 5. In the games he wasn’t playing, their win-loss ratio was good, but nothing like they were when the opener was not making many runs.
In both cases, the players had great bowlers in their lineup. But clearly, Smith wasn’t quite adding as much with the bat.
It didn’t matter; he just got bad, and barely played in losses. He basically retired from cricket mid-career to make pre-fabricated buildings. Meanwhile, Viv’s record is from being the best batter in the best team that ever lived.
If you just look at match results when looking for the winningest player ever, you can get a legend, or an anomaly. To get anywhere near the truth, you need to dig very deep into the world of Test wins.
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Australia’s team from around the end of the last millennium basically didn’t lose. And so you will not be shocked to learn that many of the players who racked up the most wins did so on this team.
Four players from that great team have won the most matches.
But even among them, Ricky Ponting really stands out.
Players dream of getting 100 Test caps for their country. The Tasmanian legend not only got more wins than that - the only one to do it - but also had 16 more victories than Shane Warne in second place.
Of course, looking just at wins is tricky, because we play so many more matches now.
Viv Richards plays through the 1970s and 1980s. And while that’s a lot more than his predecessors, it’s not even comparable to the next two decades. We have never seen more Test cricket being played in a decade than in the 2000s, which is when Ponting plays a huge chunk of his cricket.
Even though the 2000s were probably the best time to be a batter after the War, we started seeing a lot more result games. In the 1970s and 1980s, the percentage of matches with a winner hovered around the mid-50s, which bumped up a lot after the turn of the century.
The double inflation is why Ponting won more than twice the number of Test matches at a better win percentage than Neil Harvey, even though he played for only two extra years. It’s also why Viv won games less often than Michael Clarke in a similar amount of Tests, despite a much superior win-loss ratio and a longer career.
