Forty Is Good, Fifty Is Great, and Sixty Basically Does Not Exist
In Test cricket a batting average of 40 is good, 50 is elite, and 60 sustained over a career has essentially never happened — except once, at 99.94.
A Test batting average compresses a career into one number: runs scored divided by completed innings. Here is how to calibrate it.
The bands, roughly
Across nearly 150 years of Test cricket, sustained career averages sort into surprisingly stable bands:
- Under 30 — a specialist bowler or a struggling batter. Wicketkeepers historically lived here too, until the modern era raised the bar.
- 30–40 — a solid Test batter; most long international careers sit in this range.
- 40–50 — good to very good. An average in the mid-40s across 50+ Tests is a fine career.
- 50 and above — elite. Only around 50-odd players in the format’s entire history have retired with a 50+ average over a meaningful number of matches.
- 60 and above — essentially does not exist over a full career of any length. Which brings us to the outlier.
The Bradman singularity
Don Bradman’s 99.94 across 52 Tests (1928–1948) is the most famous number in cricket precisely because of those bands: the next tier of all-time greats — Smith, Sobers, Sangakkara, Ponting, Kallis, Tendulkar — cluster between about 51 and 62, most of them under 57. Bradman is not at the top of the distribution; he is outside it, roughly 40 runs per innings clear of the next sustained career. Full career tables are maintained at ESPNcricinfo’s Statsguru.
Era context moves the bar
Averages are not directly comparable across eras. Uncovered pitches before the 1960s, the absence of helmets before the late 1970s, timeless Tests, and modern bat technology all shift the scoring environment. A 45 in the 1950s and a 45 in the 2010s are different achievements — global scoring rates and averages drifted upward through the 2000s before tightening again in the last decade as bowling-friendly conditions returned. That is why statisticians increasingly quote an average alongside the era’s mean, rather than raw.
The mirror number: bowling averages
The same calibration works inverted for bowlers, where lower is better: over 35 is expensive, high 20s is solid, low-to-mid 20s is elite, and under 22 across a long career puts a bowler among the handful of all-time greats. The symmetry is the point — a team of batters averaging 40 against bowlers conceding 30 wins by roughly 100 runs a match.
So: 40 is good, 50 is elite, and if someone tells you a batter “averages 60 in Tests,” check the sample size. Over a real career, there has only ever been one exception — and he missed 100 by four runs.