Stats: The battle of captains with the ball in Test cricket

The Southampton Test held last week marked the return of International Cricket after nearly four months lost due to COVID-19 pandemic. But the match went into history books for rarest of feats it recorded thanks to the captains Ben Stokes and Jason Holder. The stand-in captain of England, Stokes, made his professional captaincy debut in this very match as Joe Root missed the game due to parental leave.

Stokes, however, was dismissed by Holder in both innings of the match while inching close to 50-run mark. He returned the favour by getting better of his counterpart cheaply in the first essay. Though Stokes missed levelling the scores with Holder on the final day, the duo had already created a rare instance in the longer format. The Southampton Test became the first-ever match in the history of Test cricket where opposition captains dismissed each other on three instances.

The pair of Ben Stokes and Jason Holder recorded only the 12th instance of the captains dismissing each other in a Men’s Test match. The last of the previous 11 instances came during the 2017 Bulawayo Test between Zimbabwe (Graeme Cremer) and West Indies (Jason Holder). There are also two instances of captains dismissing each other in a Women’s Test match.

The 1956 Auckland Test between the hosts and West Indies was the first-ever Test where captains dismissed each other. The battle between alike players, Pakistan’s Imran Khan and India’s Kapil Dev was a well-noted contest during the 1980s. The two all-rounders faced off in five Tests as opposing captains but never managed to dismiss each other in the same match.

Here are all the instances of captains dismissing each other in a Test match across Men’s and Women’s cricket:

By dismissing Stokes in both innings, the West Indies skipper Jason Holder recorded only the 19th instance in Men’s cricket of a captain dismissing his opposite number twice in a Test. It is the 3rd time Holder has achieved this feat making him the first-ever captain to be involved in three such occasions. Holder dismissed Bangladesh captain Shakib Al Hasan twice in the 2018 Kingston Test and the Afghanistan skipper Rashid Khan two times during the last year’s Lucknow Test match.

Here are all the instances of captains dismissing their opposition captains twice in a Test match across Men’s and Women’s cricket:

(Stats as on July 13, 2020)