Sharpen your pencils and swallow your marmalade on toast before you read on, everyone, it’s time for the Guardian’s annual men’s Test XI of the year (here’s the women’s team from last week). This year’s 13-person selection panel included Ali Martin, Vic Marks, Tim de Lisle, Adam Collins, Rob Smyth, Jonathan Liew, Tanya Aldred, Taha Hashim, Daniel Gallan, Emma John, Simon Burnton and James Wallace. Everyone taking part picked and submitted their own XI in the days after Australia’s victory in the third Ashes Test at Adelaide (statistics are from 1 January 2025 up to and including this match). When the votes were added up, Earth’s combined side to play Mars looked like this:

Travis Head: 759 runs at an average of 42. Votes (out of 13): 10
The E and the D in the end of England’s Ashes chances. The series took an early turn when Head volunteered to open the batting in the fourth innings of the first Test, and turned in the sort of innings England’s batters only spoke about playing. They had 205 runs to defend, which (easy to forget this bit) everyone reckoned ought to be enough on a tricky pitch but ended up looking pitifully inadequate. Ben Stokes flapped, and England’s fragile attack, which had bowled so well in the first innings of that same match, were smashed. The damage was so bad that some of them were still looking for their lines and lengths in Adelaide three weeks later, when Head scored the century that killed their last faint chance of winning the Ashes.

KL Rahul: 813 runs at 45. Votes: nine
His year felt as if he’d listened to Virat Kohli’s advice that “if you want to earn respect, give your heart and soul to Test cricket”. Having spent a decade in different roles, in and out of the team, up and down the XI, Rahul’s slow, steady batting at the top of the order, so at odds with the way the game is played in this era, added ballast to India’s cricket on tour in England. He batted for more than six hours for his hundred at Headingley, then five and a half for a second at Lord’s, and then five more for his 90 at Old Trafford. Another hundred against West Indies in an innings victory at Ahmedabad made this the most successful year of his Test career.

Shubman Gill: 983 runs at 70. Votes: 13
The crack of Gill’s bat was the soundtrack to the English summer. At the start of the tour nobody was quite sure. He was a new Test captain, leading a team that was missing two senior players, and he had never scored a Test century outside Asia. He strung together innings of 147, 269 and 161 in back-to-back matches at Headingley and Edgbaston, and another 103 at Old Trafford. All together he batted for almost 28 hours, and scored 754, which is more runs than any captain in history has ever made during a series in England, and more, too, than any Indian captain has made in a series anywhere. By the end of the summer he had outgrown the nickname Prince and become something more like a king.

Joe Root: 790 runs at 56. Votes: 12
He accomplished so much, but the hard truth is none of it was enough. Still, this was the year Root overtook all three of Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, and Ricky Ponting among the game’s all-time run-scorers. English cricket lives in thrall to its history, nobody’s ever quite as good as the best used to be, but even so there’s a very real idea that Root may just be the greatest batter the country’s ever had. He reeled off his 11th, 12th, and 13th Test centuries against India in the space of just three matches during the summer, and finished the year by removing the one caveat anyone had left, when he scored his first hundred in Australia.

Temba Bavuma (c): 310 runs at 52. Votes: seven
Five years ago the South African cricket board was deemed to be so incompetent that it was forced to give up the running of the sport. Four years ago an independent report ruled it was riddled with racial prejudice. Two years ago they had to field a third XI on a Test tour of New Zealand because they wanted all their best players for their domestic T20 league. Right now they’re in the middle of a 21-month run in which their administrators haven’t scheduled a single home Test. And despite it all they’ve beat Australia to become world Test champions and just won a series in India. None of it makes any sense, but no doubt a lot’s down to Bavuma’s inspirational leadership.

Alex Carey (wk): 743 runs at 53, 45 dismissals (40 catches, five stumpings). Votes: 13
A good wicketkeeper is supposed to go unnoticed, but Carey’s been so spectacular he’s demanded everyone’s attention. His skill was one of Australia’s single biggest advantages over England, especially in the second Ashes Test when he stymied England’s batters by coming up to the stumps to keep to both Scott Boland and Michael Neser. He’s also grown into a calm, capable batter, bolstering the team’s brittle top order. By the end of the year, even Stuart Broad had admitted that he’d got it horribly wrong when he said Carey would only ever be remembered for running out Jonny Bairstow at Lord’s back in 2023.

Ravindra Jadeja: 764 runs at 64, 25 wickets at an average of 38. Votes: seven
There are a few flecks of grey in Jadeja’s beard these days, which fits, because after the retirements of Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin he’s become the senior player in the team. The tour of England was the best he’s ever had as a batter, with 516 runs, four half-centuries and an unbeaten hundred to secure a draw at Old Trafford among them. The flip-side is that his bowling fell away, and that same series was only the second he’s ever played in which he went at more than 3.5 runs an over. He was better back at home, where he picked up 18 wickets in four Tests against West Indies and South Africa.

Ben Stokes: 478 runs at 34, 29 wickets at 25. Votes: seven
So the knight didn’t slay the dragon, and the princess never did get rescued from the tower. The great project of Stokes’ later years ended with him dogging out long, performative innings while the team he’s spent years building collapsed around him. Stokes has always been a more complicated man than he makes himself sound, and after four years of worrying about the job, his captaincy has lost some of the clarity and compassion that made it so effective at the start. He had his best year with the ball in a decade largely, you guess, because his bowling was what the team needed most from him, and there was one monumental century, at Old Trafford against India.

Mitchell Starc: 283 runs at 28, 51 wickets at 17. Votes: 13
Starc recorded career-best figures twice in successive Tests this year. In July he took six for nine against West Indies in Kingston, which was such a thorough demolition that the home board was forced to call in Brian Lara, Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards to figure out what the hell had gone wrong with their cricket. Then he turned England inside-out by taking seven for 58 in Perth, single-handedly denuding them of the idea that they had a sniff of controlling the Ashes just because Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood were injured. If that wasn’t enough, he also top-scored with the bat twice, including his unbeaten 58 in the World Test Championship final.

Simon Harmer: 30 wickets at 14. Votes: 10
And they say county cricket doesn’t turn out Test cricketers. After eight years at Essex, during which he’d taken well over 500 first-class wickets but only played five Tests, Harmer picked up his international career again when he met Bavuma at the pub after the team’s victory in the World Test Championship final and asked him to please let the head coach, Shukri Conrad, know he was available. Three months later he was back in the squad for their tours of Pakistan and India. Over the next six weeks he picked up 30 wickets at an average of just 14, including eight for 51 in the first and nine for 101 in the second matches of a famous series win against India, when he out-foxed the world’s best spin-bowling team in their own backyard.

Jasprit Bumrah: 31 wickets at 22. Votes: eight
The nonpareil. Bumrah is arguably the single most influential cricketer in the game right now, and India seem to be two different teams depending on whether or not he’s playing. He filleted England’s batting twice during the summer, once in Leeds with five for 83, then again at Lord’s where he took five for 74. He worked over West Indies at home and then skittled South Africa, too, when he took five for 27 in Kolkata. The odd thing was that in the end, India lost three of those same games despite his efforts, which made it feel like everyone else in the team was depending on him too much.

• This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions. Have a very happy year and see you in 2026