Best Bowling Figures in Cricket History: Every Format's Record Explained (2026)

Most batting records get broken every few years. Bowling records do not — several of the marks below have stood since before television covered the sport, and one of them, nineteen wickets in a single match, is almost certainly permanent.

Here is every format’s best bowling analysis, and why the newest entry on the list comes from a country most cricket fans could not place on a map.

Test cricket

Best figures in an innings

Figures	Bowler	Match	Year
10/53	Jim Laker (England)	v Australia, Old Trafford	1956
10/74	Anil Kumble (India)	v Pakistan, Delhi	1999
10/119	Ajaz Patel (New Zealand)	v India, Mumbai	2021
9/28	George Lohmann (England)	v South Africa, Johannesburg	1896
9/37	Jim Laker (England)	v Australia, Old Trafford (1st innings)	1956

Only three bowlers in the 148-year history of Test cricket have taken all ten wickets in an innings. Ajaz Patel’s is the strangest of the three — a New Zealand left-arm spinner doing it in Mumbai, the city he was born in, against India.

Best figures in a match

Jim Laker: 19/90, England v Australia, Old Trafford, 1956.

Nine wickets in the first innings, all ten in the second. His bowling partner at the other end, Tony Lock, took one.

This is the record that will never fall. Taking nineteen wickets requires the opposition to lose twenty and for one bowler to claim nearly all of them across both innings — a combination of pitch, form and circumstance that has not recurred in seventy years. Second on the list is Sydney Barnes with 17/159, from 1913.

One-day internationals

Figures	Bowler	Opponent	Year
8/19	Chaminda Vaas (Sri Lanka)	v Zimbabwe	2001
7/12	Shahid Afridi (Pakistan)	v West Indies	2013
7/15	Glenn McGrath (Australia)	v Namibia	2003
7/18	Rashid Khan (Afghanistan)	v West Indies	2017
7/20	Andy Bichel (Australia)	v England	2003

Vaas’s spell is the one that stands apart: eight overs, three maidens, nineteen runs, eight wickets. He had four of them inside the first sixteen deliveries. Twenty-five years later it remains the only eight-wicket haul in ODI history.

Note how many of these came in World Cups. McGrath’s 7/15 and Bichel’s 7/20 both arrived in the 2003 tournament — pressure conditions produce these more often than league cricket does. More on that in our guide to Cricket World Cup records.

T20 internationals — where the Associate nations rewrote the book

This is the format where the record book has changed most, and it has changed almost entirely through Associate and Affiliate cricket.

Figures	Bowler	Opponent	Year
8/7	Sonam Yeshey (Bhutan)	v Myanmar, Gelephu	2025
7/8	Syazrul Idrus (Malaysia)	v China	2023
7/19	Ali Dawood (Bahrain)	v Bhutan	2025
6/5	Peter Aho (Nigeria)	v Sierra Leone	2021
6/7	Deepak Chahar (India)	v Bangladesh	2019

Sonam Yeshey of Bhutan is the only bowler to take eight wickets in a T20 international, doing it against Myanmar in December 2025 for seven runs.

There is a real reason the top of this table looks like this, and it is not a fluke of small samples. When the ICC granted full T20I status to all member nations, every match between Associate and Affiliate sides became an official international. That opened the record books to fixtures where the gap between two teams can be enormous — and where a bowler can genuinely run through a side.

Purists occasionally object that these records “do not count.” They do count, and they are recorded as internationals because the ICC decided that every member’s cricket is international cricket. The alternative — a record book open only to twelve countries — is the thing that kept the sport small.

It is also why Associate cricket is worth following rather than dismissing.

First-class cricket

Hedley Verity: 10/10, Yorkshire v Nottinghamshire, Headingley, 1932.

Ten wickets for ten runs. Nineteen point four overs, sixteen maidens. Seven of the wickets came in the final fifteen deliveries of the match.

It is the best analysis in the history of first-class cricket and, like Laker’s nineteen, effectively unassailable.

The hat-trick records

• Most international hat-tricks: Lasith Malinga (Sri Lanka) — five across formats, including the only double hat-trick in international cricket: four wickets in four balls against South Africa at the 2007 World Cup.
• Most Test hat-tricks: Stuart Broad and Wasim Akram, among others, with two each. Broad’s spell of 8/15 against Australia at Trent Bridge in 2015 is the modern benchmark for a match-turning burst.
• Fastest five-wicket haul in T20Is: several bowlers have taken five in an over-and-a-bit; the format’s compression makes this more common than it is elsewhere.

Why bowling records outlast batting records

The pattern is consistent across every format and it comes down to structural drift. Bats got heavier, boundaries got shorter, pitches got flatter, and fielding restrictions got tighter — all of which inflate batting numbers over time and deflate bowling ones.

A bowler in 1956 could bowl on an uncovered, rain-affected pitch to a batting side with no protective equipment and a defensive mindset. A bowler in 2026 bowls on a road with two new balls, a boundary rope pulled twenty metres in, and a batter swinging from the first delivery.

That is why Laker, Verity and Barnes still sit at the top. Their records are not just unbroken — the conditions that produced them no longer exist.

The exception, and it is a genuinely interesting one, is the T20I list. That record book is young, its participant pool has just expanded enormously, and it is being rewritten right now by bowlers from Bhutan, Malaysia and Bahrain. It is the one part of cricket’s record book where the newest entries are the most remarkable.

More records: most wickets in cricket history · highest individual scores · fastest centuries · greatest world records in cricket