The December 2024 issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly named Yashasvi Jaiswal, Rachin Ravindra, Kamindu Mendis, and Harry Brook as the Fab Four of the 2020s. The piece, and the individual profiles of the four cricketers, was first published in issue 83 of the magazine.
Explaining the decision, editor-in-chief Phil Walker elaborated how “Test cricket’s ceaseless arm wrestle appears to be tilting the way of the outsider." He adds how “bowlers are on the march” in a “batter’s game”.
Walker observed that twelve batters averaged more than 50 between the start of 2011 and the end of 2017, a count that shrinks to one between the start of 2018 and now. “Test batting averages are on the wane,” he observed, while making a note of the “clusters of weirdly unpredictable Test matches” and the “basically obsolete” draws. At the point of writing, there had been only one draw in 2024.
