The partnership breakers

There was a famous bit of commentary on Sky when Paul Collingwood came on to bowl in a Test match relatively early in his career and the commentator said “he’s a partnership breaker”. His career stats duly came up on the screen, as they do when a player bowls for the first time in an innings: Collingwood Tests 14, Overs 56, Runs 183, Wickets 0. Mike Atherton responded “So, which partnership did he break then?”

Collingwood was the archetypical partnership breaker: medium-pacer, 5^th or 6^th bowler, exactly the type you bring on when the partnership has been going on for a while, and you are running out of options. And, at that point in his career he had broken a fair number of partnerships in first-class cricket and in ODIs, so the observation that he was a partnership-breaker was fair enough; he just hadn’t done it yet in Test cricket. But who are the leading partnership-breakers in Test cricket? We know which batter was out at the fall of each wicket in Test cricket, so we can calculate the average partnership that each bowler broke.