The Profile
A cricket career with numbers to match the reputation.
Glenn McGrath was the opposite of the West Indian fast bowlers he helped to displace at the top of world cricket in the late 1990s and 2000s. He was not especially fast. He was not physically imposing. What he did have was an ability to land the ball on the same postage stamp of pitch for spells of twenty overs, and that alone was enough to take 563 Test wickets and make him one of the most successful bowlers in the history of the game.
McGrath's Ashes hauls against England in 1997, 2001 and 2002-03 included some of the most sustained destruction of an international batting lineup in the modern era. He usually predicted scores before every Ashes tour and he was usually right. The 2005 series was the outlier because England finally had a side that could cope with him, and even then only just.
He has been a cricket administrator, a Big Bash consultant, and co-founder of the McGrath Foundation, which has funded breast cancer nurses in Australia for almost two decades in memory of his late wife Jane. The foundation is now part of the fabric of Australian cricket, and the annual Pink Test at the SCG is one of the most emotional events on the cricket calendar.
“I told the press the same forecast every series. Five nil. I was once right enough times in a row that people stopped asking me to explain the joke.”
Career highlights
- 563 Test wickets for Australia
- 124 Test matches
- Three Cricket World Cup winner, 1999, 2003, 2007
- Member of the Order of Australia
- Co-founder of the McGrath Foundation
- ICC Hall of Fame
First hand
Glenn McGrath at Steam
Glenn spoke at Steam in June 2023. The foundation stories moved the room. The Ashes stories made the room laugh until they cried. Both were equally memorable.