Jonny Bairstow followed skipper Ben Stokes to become the 77th player to make 100 Test appearances. Stokes had reached the milestone in the Ranchi Test match last month, and Bairstow now becomes the 17th player from England to bring up the milestone.
Alongside Bairstow and Stokes, Joe Root and James Anderson are the only active English players to boast of more than 100 Test caps. Bairstow had made his Test debut at Lord’s in 2012 as a batter and only took over keeping duties in late 2013 during the Ashes series in Australia.
Bairstow has 5974 runs in Test cricket thus far, averaging 36.42 with 12 hundreds. He also has 242 catches and 14 stumping to his name in the format. Interestingly, one of his best knocks in the format came in another fifth Test of a series against India, in Birmingham in 2022.
With England 2-1 down in the series, Bairstow smashed hundreds in both innings of the Test match to give England a series-levelling win at home, helping them chase down a massive target of 378 in the fourth innings.
