BIPIN DANI
In a game where greatness is usually measured by runs piled and wickets claimed, there lurks another tally one less glamorous, yet quietly poetic: the duck.
On a July morning in Edgbaston, 2025, amidst the clash of titans India vs England an unsuspecting batter waddled into history. Brydon Carse, England’s fiery lower-order hope, faced a ball from Mohammed Siraj that curved like fate itself. Pitch. Swing. Pad. Up went the appeal. Up went the finger.
And just like that, men’s Test cricket had reached its 10,000th duck.
Carse, head down, trudged off. Another number in a game of numbers. Yet, this duck wasn’t ordinary it was monumental, feathered in folklore.
Siraj, playing with the confidence of a man bowling on a pitch he’d dreamed of as a boy, had done more than claim a scalp. He’d scripted a trivia titan. The crowd, unaware at first, buzzed with murmurs before the stat blazed across screens: 10,000 ducks in men’s Test history.
From the noble zero of Marjoribanks in 1877 to Carse’s quack nearly 150 years later, the number spoke of every great batter humbled, every tail-ender bamboozled, and every bowler’s gleeful roar.
So Carse might not hang that innings on his wall, but history certainly did.
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