England pacer James Anderson has completed 700 wickets in Test cricket and is the first pace bowler to do so in the history of the sport. Overall, he is the third bowler in the longest format of the game to breach the magical number with Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne doing it before him.
Anderson needed two wickets coming into the fifth and final Test against India in Dharamsala and he achieved the feat on the third day of the match as he got rid of Kuldeep Yadav.
Players with the most wickets in Test cricket
| Players |
Wickets |
| Muttiah Muralitharan (Sri Lanka) |
800 |
| Shane Warne (Australia) |
708 |
| James Anderson (England) |
700 |
| Anil Kumble (India) |
619 |
| Stuart Broad (England) |
604 |
| Glenn McGrath (Australia) |
563 |
| Nathan Lyon |
527 |
Anderson didn't waste much time and grabbed his 700th wicket with just his tenth ball of day three. The veteran England pacer bowled a length ball outside of Kuldeep's off-stump and the latter couldn't help himself from poking at it. England's wicketkeeper Ben Foakes held a simple catch to help Anderson become the first England bowler to scale the milestone.
Notably, Anderson is now just nine wickets away from going past Australia's veteran leg-spinner Shane Warne. Warne snared a total of 708 wickets in his legendary Test career before he retired from the sport in January 2007. Anderson made his Test debut against Zimbabwe in May 2003 and interestingly the two countries have not played a Test match against each other since then.
England's Playing XI:
Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Ben Stokes (c), Jonny Bairstow, Ben Foakes (wk), Tom Hartley, Shoaib Bashir, Mark Wood, James Anderson
India's Playing XI:
Yashasvi Jaiswal, Rohit Sharma (c), Shubman Gill, Devdutt Padikkal, Ravindra Jadeja, Sarfaraz Khan, Dhruv Jurel (wk), Ravichandran Ashwin, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohammed Siraj, Jasprit Bumrah
