The All-Rounder Test: Only Six Players in Twenty Years Pass It

"All-rounder" is the most abused word in cricket. Almost every side claims two or three. Almost none of them has one.

There is a definition that settles it without argument, and it is old, simple and brutal: a genuine all-rounder scores more runs per dismissal than he concedes per wicket. If your batting average beats your bowling average, every time you play you are giving your team more than you cost it in both departments at once.

So we applied it to every Test career in our records.

The qualifying group

We took every player in our Test data with at least 2,000 runs and 100 wickets, which is enough of both to prove the workload was real rather than occasional. Fourteen players qualify.

The six who pass

Batting average against bowling average, in our data:

1. Jacques Kallis: 55.4 with the bat, 33.2 with the ball. An advantage of 22.2.
2. Ravindra Jadeja: 38.4 and 25.5. Advantage 12.9.
3. Shakib Al Hasan: 37.6 and 32.6. Advantage 5.0.
4. Ben Stokes: 34.5 and 31.0. Advantage 3.5.
5. Ravichandran Ashwin: 25.8 and 24.1. Advantage 1.7.
6. Daniel Vettori: 36.6 and 35.1. Advantage 1.5.

That is the list. Six players, out of every Test career in twenty years of our data, who cleared a bar that sounds like the minimum requirement for the job title.

Kallis is not on the same chart as everybody else

An advantage of 22.2 runs is not a margin, it is a different category of cricketer. He averaged 55.4 with the bat, which would make him a great specialist batter with no bowling at all, and then took 119 wickets at 33.2 on top of it.

The gap between Kallis and Jadeja, who is second, is larger than the gap between Jadeja and everyone below him combined. Our data holds 77 of his Tests, and the answer to "who was the best all-rounder of the era" is not close enough to be interesting.

Jadeja is the one people still underrate

Second on the list, and by a distance from third: 4,075 runs at 38.4 and 342 wickets at 25.5 from 88 Tests in our data.

Read those two numbers again. A bowling average of 25.5 would make him a frontline Test spinner in any side in the world on its own merits. The batting average of 38.4 is higher than several specialist batters currently in Test teams. He passes the bar by nearly 13 runs, and he is routinely described as a bowling all-rounder, which undersells half of him.

And the one who was in Darwin this month

Mehedi Hasan Miraz does not pass the bar, and that is not the interesting part. In our data he has 2,160 runs and 213 wickets from 56 Tests, and he was in the Bangladesh side at Darwin this month, in the Test where they ended the third day six wickets from a first win in Australia.

At 23.7 with the bat and 32.5 with the ball he is a long way from the Kallis line. He is also 213 Test wickets into a career, which is a substantial contribution by any standard, and the bar we set here is deliberately the hardest one in the sport.

The near misses, which are instructive

Jason Holder comes closest to passing without doing it: 30.0 batting, 31.1 bowling, short by 1.1 runs. On another dozen Tests he could cross it in either direction.

Moeen Ali at 28.1 and 37.3 is nine runs short, which is the honest picture of a genuinely useful cricketer who was neither a frontline batter nor a frontline bowler.

And then the group who fail it heavily and are still among the finest players of the era: Stuart Broad (18.0 and 27.7), Mitchell Starc (20.5 and 26.5), Tim Southee (15.5 and 30.3), Chris Woakes (25.1 and 29.6). These are bowlers who bat, which is a different and perfectly honourable thing, and the test correctly refuses to call them all-rounders.

Why the bar deserves to be this high

A team picking a genuine all-rounder gets to play an extra specialist somewhere else. That is the whole strategic value, and it only exists if the player is genuinely worth a place in both disciplines.

Six players in twenty years of our records clear it. That is why sides keep searching, keep announcing they have found one, and keep discovering two seasons later that they have a useful cricketer instead.

Coverage

Our Test records begin in 2005, so Kallis and Vettori lose their earliest Tests and their figures here cover the later part of their careers. Every total is a figure in our data rather than a complete career record. Matches involving Afghanistan's men's team are withheld from the archive our Test records are built on and are absent.

All figures computed by CricNerd from our own Test career records, 2005 onwards.