Jacob Duffy Height, Age, Girlfriend, Wife, Children, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Jacob Duffy

• Jacob Duffy was born in Lumsden, a town of 530 people in the Southland region of New Zealand. He went to school at Southland Boys’ High School in Invercargill, a city of around 51,200 people.

• The Southland region has just over 100,000 people in total. From childhood itself, cricket was a serious business in the Duffy household.

• His father rolled a pitch into their backyard in Lumsden. When the family moved to Invercargill, the backyard cricket grew more competitive.

• Neighbourhood children came over regularly. They kept scorebooks, assigned countries to each other and played out full Test matches.

• Duffy played as New Zealand. His older brother Ryan, who later scored a first-class century for Otago, played as Australia.

• A friend always chose to be the West Indies. Players had to retire at 50 and come back in again. Playing against older children from a young age helped Duffy develop faster.

• New Zealand does not have a provincial team based in Southland. So Duffy played for Otago, the nearest option, though the two regions carry an old rivalry going back many decades.

• He played most of his domestic cricket at the University Oval in Dunedin, a ground with small boundaries. That forced him to bowl accurately on flat pitches.

• He was the joint leading wicket-taker in the 2017-18 Plunket Shield season for Otago, with 29 dismissals in eight matches.

• In the 2018-19 Ford Trophy, he took 25 wickets in eleven matches, the most for Otago that season.

• He also took 13 wickets in nine matches in the 2018-19 Super Smash, joint highest for Otago.

• In 2016-17, Duffy took a full season off cricket at the suggestion of Otago coach Rob Walter. He had lost his natural swing and accuracy while trying to bowl faster.

• Missing a home summer was difficult. He used the break to study his own action closely. That understanding of his own body and his own bowling has stayed with him since.

• In November 2020, Duffy received a call up to the New Zealand A team for practice matches against the touring West Indies side.

• The following month, New Zealand named him in their T20 squad for the series against Pakistan. On his T20 debut, he took 4 wickets for 33 runs from four overs and won the player of the match award.

• He is the first Southlander to play for New Zealand since 1993. In April 2021, New Zealand named Duffy in their Test squad for the series against England and for the final of the 2019-21 ICC World Test Championship.

• In May 2022, they named him again in the Test squad for the tour of England. In June 2022, New Zealand named him in the ODI squad for the tour of Ireland.

• On 2 June 2022, Duffy signed a short-term deal to play as an overseas player for Kent County Cricket Club in two County Championship matches.

• He took eight wickets in his debut for the county, including a five-wicket haul with three wickets in a single over.

• In 2023, Duffy went past a record that had stood for nearly 30 years and became Otago’s highest wicket-taker across all formats.

• Ryan Duffy sat in the stands the day his younger brother made his debut for New Zealand.

• In September 2024, Duffy signed a short-term contract with Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club for their final two County Championship matches of the season.

• In December 2024, he signed for Worcestershire County Cricket Club for the first half of the 2025 season.

• Duffy finished 2025 with 81 wickets across international formats, a New Zealand record for wickets in a single calendar year.

• The man whose record he broke, Richard Hadlee, sent him a message after the final Test against West Indies in Mount Maunganui.

• Duffy did not recognise the sender at first as the message carried no title, only a first name. New Zealand faced injuries to three seamers during that West Indies Test series.

• He bowled 154.3 overs across the three Tests. He had made his red-ball debut only a few months before that series.

• New Zealand drew in Christchurch and won in Wellington.

• Neil Wagner, his long-time team-mate, shaped his understanding of what it takes to bowl long spells for the team day after day.

• New Zealand bowling coach Jacob Oram confirmed that Duffy picked up new deliveries along the way.

• Duffy took part in a campaign to give Southland more recognition within the Otago cricket setup.

• In December 2025, the Otago men’s and women’s T20 teams dropped the Otago name and became the Volts and the Sparks, representing four districts across a wider area.

• That same month, he posted on Instagram that he was expecting a child with Natasha Duffy.

• On 10 February 2026, the Otago jersey added Southland’s maroon colour alongside the traditional blue and gold during a Ford Trophy match against Canterbury.

• Duffy helped design the jersey, drawing inspiration from the Southland Stags rugby team.

• In the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2026 auction, Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) acquired him for his base price of Rs 2 crores.

• Duffy made his IPL debut on 28 March 2026 against Sunrisers Hyderabad at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru.

• He stepped in as lead pacer with Josh Hazlewood absent and took 3 wickets for 22 runs.

• He bowled short of a length consistently and kept the SRH batters in check throughout their innings. RCB won the match by six wickets.