Greatest All-Rounders in Cricket History: The Complete List

Selectors have a name for the player who bats well enough to hold a middle-order spot and bowls well enough to lead the attack: they call him a luxury. Genuine all-rounders are rare enough that entire team compositions get built around finding one, and the handful who actually delivered on both fronts changed how their teams could be picked.

Criteria for Greatness as an All-Rounder

A genuine all-rounder meets two conditions:

• Batting: capable of batting in the middle order or higher and making significant contributions
• Bowling: capable of taking wickets consistently at the highest level, not merely containing

The “bits and pieces” player, good at one skill and useful in the other, fills a valuable role on a team but isn’t a true all-rounder in the historical sense.

The Greatest All-Rounders in Test Cricket

Player	Country	Era	Batting style	Bowling style
Garfield Sobers	West Indies	1954–1974	Left-hand, middle order	Left-arm pace and spin
Imran Khan	Pakistan	1971–1992	Right-hand, lower-middle order	Right-arm fast-medium
Richard Hadlee	New Zealand	1973–1990	Right-hand, lower order	Right-arm fast-medium
Ian Botham	England	1977–1992	Right-hand, lower-middle order	Right-arm fast-medium
Kapil Dev	India	1978–1994	Right-hand, lower-middle order	Right-arm fast-medium
Jacques Kallis	South Africa	1995–2013	Right-hand, middle order	Right-arm medium-fast
Ben Stokes	England	2011–present	Left-hand, middle order	Right-arm fast-medium
Shakib Al Hasan	Bangladesh	2006–present	Left-hand, top-middle order	Left-arm spin

Garfield Sobers — The Benchmark

Sobers bowled in three distinct styles across his career, left-arm orthodox spin, wrist spin, and left-arm pace, switching between them depending on conditions and match situation. He batted with the same range, capable of grinding out a long innings or dismantling an attack, and held the record for the highest individual Test score for years. Any conversation about the best all-rounder still starts with him.

The 1980s Quartet

Four great all-rounders played at the same time in the 1980s: Imran Khan, Richard Hadlee, Ian Botham, and Kapil Dev. Each could win a Test match batting or bowling, and comparisons between them fueled some of the decade’s best cricket arguments. Hadlee is often rated the most technically complete bowler of the group. Botham’s most famous stretch, the 1981 Ashes series against Australia, still ranks among the great individual performances in the sport.

Jacques Kallis — The Case for Statistical Greatness

Kallis’s Test numbers, more than 13,000 runs and over 290 wickets, are hard to match as a combined record. He piled up runs over a long career while also taking wickets consistently, though his understated style meant he never got the attention his statistics justified. Looked at coldly, those numbers make him a serious candidate for greatest all-rounder by sustained output alone.

Modern All-Rounders

Ben Stokes has become the defining Test all-rounder of his generation, producing match-winning performances with bat and ball in the same game more than once. Shakib Al Hasan’s record across ODI and T20 cricket stands alongside his Test numbers as one of the most complete across formats. Ravindra Jadeja pairs left-arm spin with a batting game that keeps improving, plus fielding that regularly turns matches on its own.