The traditional dilemma with a cricket team is how to get a guinea’s worth of value from a £1 budget. Ideally you’d want seven batsmen and five bowlers. That’s twelve players in an 11-a-side sport. The extra shilling usually comes from a talented individual who can contribute with both bat and ball.
The qualities this special player needs are to score as many runs as a specialist middle-order batsman and also to bowl as effectively as the other four members of the bowling unit. Anything short of this and you have not an all-rounder but an nearly-rounder. A squarer peg for the all-rounder hole.
Who are the players who have filled this role best in test match history? Names like Garry Sobers, Imran Khan, Ian Botham and Keith Miller spring to mind. But how to determine their effectiveness in filling that pivotal role?
Cricinfo’s statistics can give us the raw data. I now have a spreadsheet with all 2574 test match players and their raw figures. How can I use this data to identify the best all-rounders?
Out of 2574 players, 82 never batted long enough to get dismissed and 1053 never took a wicket. This includes 26 players who did neither in their test match career. No wickets and no completed innings: no hopers? Well Stuart Law is one of them so you decide. Nevertheless, I think we can rule them out as all-rounders straight away. That leaves us with 1466 players who have taken a test match wicket and have a test batting average. Who were the best?
Let’s look at batting averages and bowling averages. You’d expect a test match lower-middle-order batsman to be averaging over 30. You’d also expect them to be taking wickets at less than 35 runs apiece. This gives us 120 all-rounders by this very broad and somewhat arbitrary definition. However the list includes players like Mark Boucher who played as a wicketkeeper-batsman but once took a wicket as an eighth-change bowler against the West Indies as a dull test match petered out into a draw.
So we need some qualifying numbers of runs and wickets to weed out these statistical anomalies. Again I will introduce an arbitrary cut-off of 500 runs and 50 wickets. This leaves us with 29 players who might be selected on the basis of either their batting or bowling alone.
We need a way of ranking these players as all-rounders. We can assess their contribution with the bat and ball by seeing by how much they exceed the qualifying criteria. In other words, how much higher is their batting average than 30. How much lower is their bowling average than 35? But there’s another factor - catching. Catches, as we all know, win matches. As your all-rounder you want a proper batsman, a proper bowler and a fielder who can pluck swallows from the sky.
By the magic of arbitrariness I have assigned an x-factor to each all-rounder. It’s simply a multiplier of their batting average in excess of 30, their bowling average below 35 and their number of catches per 100 matches. And the result:
| Player | Matches | Runs | Bat Av | Wkts | Bowl Av | Ct | X-factor |
| GS Sobers (WI) | 93 | 8032 | 57.78 | 235 | 34.03 | 109 | 3370 |
| JH Kallis (ICC/SA) | 134 | 10587 | 54.85 | 258 | 31.33 | 150 | 3193 |
| AW Greig (Eng) | 58 | 3599 | 40.43 | 141 | 32.2 | 87 | 1985 |
| JM Gregory (Aus) | 24 | 1146 | 36.96 | 85 | 31.15 | 37 | 1667 |
| TL Goddard (SA) | 41 | 2516 | 34.46 | 123 | 26.22 | 48 | 1550 |
| GA Faulkner (SA) | 25 | 1754 | 40.79 | 82 | 26.58 | 20 | 1537 |
| BM McMillan (SA) | 38 | 1968 | 39.36 | 75 | 33.82 | 49 | 1359 |
| KR Miller (Aus) | 55 | 2958 | 36.97 | 170 | 22.97 | 38 | 1313 |
| IT Botham (Eng) | 102 | 5200 | 33.54 | 383 | 28.4 | 120 | 1193 |
| Mushtaq Mohammad (Pak) | 57 | 3643 | 39.17 | 79 | 29.22 | 42 | 1102 |
| Asif Iqbal (Pak) | 58 | 3575 | 38.85 | 53 | 28.33 | 36 | 963 |
| SM Pollock (SA) | 108 | 3781 | 32.31 | 421 | 23.11 | 72 | 947 |
| C Kelleway (Aus) | 26 | 1422 | 37.42 | 52 | 32.36 | 24 | 929 |
| WW Armstrong (Aus) | 50 | 2863 | 38.68 | 87 | 33.59 | 44 | 888 |
| W Rhodes (Eng) | 58 | 2325 | 30.19 | 127 | 26.96 | 60 | 851 |
| ER Dexter (Eng) | 62 | 4502 | 47.89 | 66 | 34.93 | 29 | 840 |
| ST Jayasuriya (SL) | 110 | 6973 | 40.07 | 98 | 34.34 | 78 | 761 |
| FE Woolley (Eng) | 64 | 3283 | 36.07 | 83 | 33.91 | 64 | 716 |
| MA Noble (Aus) | 42 | 1997 | 30.25 | 121 | 25 | 26 | 635 |
| Imran Khan (Pak) | 88 | 3807 | 37.69 | 362 | 22.81 | 28 | 633 |
| GE Gomez (WI) | 29 | 1243 | 30.31 | 58 | 27.41 | 18 | 490 |
| JDP Oram (NZ) | 33 | 1780 | 36.32 | 60 | 33.05 | 15 | 376 |
| JR Reid (NZ) | 58 | 3428 | 33.28 | 85 | 33.35 | 43 | 374 |
| N Kapil Dev (India) | 131 | 5248 | 31.05 | 434 | 29.64 | 64 | 313 |
| MH Mankad (India) | 44 | 2109 | 31.47 | 162 | 32.32 | 33 | 311 |
| A Flintoff (Eng/ICC) | 79 | 3845 | 31.77 | 226 | 32.78 | 52 | 263 |
| CL Cairns (NZ) | 62 | 3320 | 33.53 | 218 | 29.4 | 14 | 206 |
| DL Vettori (ICC/NZ) | 97 | 3779 | 30.72 | 313 | 33.61 | 55 | 120 |
| IK Pathan (India) | 29 | 1105 | 31.57 | 100 | 32.26 | 8 | 119 |
Fascinating.
Garry Sobers is top, as you might expect. But the evil Jacques Kallis joins him in a top two who are miles ahead of the pack. More than 1000 x-factor points separate them from their nearest rival.
But this list looks good. It’s got all the usual suspects. Andrew Flintoff sneaks in although history will probably be less kind to him than our memories suggest. History’s judgement on Flintoff: a bit better than Daniel Vettori (but not as good a captain).
Notable absences: Richard Hadlee and Trevor Bailey averaged under 30 with the bat. Steve Waugh and Lance Klusener over 35 with the ball. Ravi Shastri averaged over 40 with the ball.
Graeme Swann will join the list when he has another 37 test runs (batting average 35.61, bowling average 29.65). Stuart Broad needs to get his batting average of 28.71 up a bit.