caught in the middle of a hundred and five

You might recall, if you're inclined to notice obscure cricketing milestones, some headlines a few years back about England's Joe Root scoring a hundred in his hundredth Test match. He was the ninth batsman to achieve the feat, and the first to turn such a century into a double-century. His innings of 218 remains the highest by a batsman in his hundredth Test, although Australia's David Warner emulated the feat of scoring a double-century when he became the tenth and most recent member of the club in 2022. The graphic below was produced by Cricinfo when Root joined the club in 2021.

There are, at the time of writing, 78 cricketers who have played at least 100 Test matches (Colin Cowdrey was the first to reach the milestone in 1968 and marked it by scoring 104), and by my rough calculation only around 20 of them have been primarily bowlers, which means there are roughly three times as many batsmen as bowlers on that list. That seems unsurprising, as bowling is a much more physically demanding activity than batting.

One bowler who has recently joined the list is Australia's Mitchell Starc, whose 100th Test came against the West Indies in Kingston in July, and was marked by Starc returning the remarkable figures of 6 for 9 in West Indies' second innings. That prompted me to think: since a 5-wicket haul is (roughly) the bowling equivalent of a century, how many bowlers have done that in their 100th Test match? I've done some slightly half-arsed research and I think I have the data below. It's a much smaller list than for the batsmen, but worthy of note I think.

Bowler	Country	Opposition	When	Figures
Shane Warne	Australia	South Africa	March 2002	6-161
Muttiah Muralitharan	Sri Lanka	Bangladesh	February 2006	6-54
Ravichandran Ashwin	India	England	March 2024	5-77
Mitchell Starc	Australia	West Indies	July 2025	6-9

Starc, as you can see, is the first proper fast bowler to perform the feat, the other three being spinners.