On The Nature Of All Rounders

All rounders are crickets most valuable players. Arguments over them rage longer than plain batsmen and bowlers.

One of the reasons is that all rounders are hard to pidgeon-hole into buckets. After all, every cricketer is an all rounder to some extent. Everyone can bat and bowl, that's how we learn cricket growing up. We've all played in school cricket teams where half the team bats in the top order and bowls all the overs while the other half can't bat or bowl at all.

Another reason is that all rounders are so vital to team composition. Generalising across formats, a team usually needs at least five guys who can bowl, one guy to keep wicket, and as many guys as possible who can bat. How you optimise team composition given those constraints and the varying skills of the players available is a key problem facing coaches and captains.

I've had this post parked in draft for years, not quite able to put my thoughts into words without sounding like a rambling reddit fanboi as I categorised the different types of all rounders and then speculated on the nature of team composition.

Luckily Jarrod Kimber has laid this all out way better than I could. Enjoy:

The Next Sobers

A lotta guys have, at one time or another, been branded the greatest thing since Garry Sobers. 'The next Sobers' or some variation on that is staple fare for over-excited commentators and press.

Let's take a look at how some of these fellows have fared...

Image from Sporting Life

Stuart Broad

"He's a wonderful player. There's a little bit of Sobers in him," gushed none other than that old card Geoff Boycott in July 2008, provoked to such an unusual level of excitement by Broad's tail-end batting and bowling in the second Test against South Africa.

Five years and 60-odd Tests later, 2010 runs at 24.21 and 238 wickets at 30.31 suggests that Stuey is rather more like the next Heath Streak.

Yuvraj Singh

After Yuvraj nailed a young Stuart Broad for six sixes in an over in the T20 World Cup, Pak batting legend Hanif Mohammed was moved to haul out the Sobers comparison. "For a moment, I thought that Sobers was batting,"said he.

Now I've always rated Yuvraj highly but with 1900 Test runs at 33.92 and 9 wickets at 60.77, Sobers he ain't. Even if we charitably look at his 8329 ODI runs (at 36.27) and 111 wickets (at 38.18) the best one can do is hail our boy Yuvvie as the next Aravinda de Silva.

Shaun Pollock

Now Polly was a fine bowling all rounder, no doubt about that. I hope to have more to say on the subject in due course. But in 2001 when the late Bob Woolmer wrote for cricinfo that "Shaun could easily become the next Garry Sobers" he was letting his enthusiasm get the better of him.

When Polly looks back on his stellar Test record of 3781 runs at 32.31 and 421 wickets at 23.11 even he will be force to agree that Woolmer should have hailed him as, at best, the next Richard Hadlee. No mean act to follow, but no Sobers.

Colin Miller

Now there's no doubt that Miller was a handy bits n pieces all rounder, but in 1998 when Agnew accused the Aussie press of "building Miller up to the realms of being the next Garry Sobers", there was surely an element of cognitive dissonance somewhere.

With 174 Test runs at 8.28 and 69 wickets at 26.15, Miller would have been better described as the next Roy Tattersall. Yeah, I had to look him up too. 

Kallis: Here Come The Naysayers

The retirement of Jacques Kallis from Tests marks the end of an era in South African cricket, an era that spans just a little less than my own interest in the game. In my lifetime I doubt that we will see another player in the same class from any cricket playing nation.

The Internet is already full of articles singing his praises and digesting his remarkable statistics, but Kallis has always had his share of critics and they have also been sharpening their pens. Kartikeya Date's thoughtful article "Can Kallis really be called an allrounder?" does a good job of putting words and numbers to what most others struggle to articulate. In the coming weeks no doubt we will see more of the same.

Kartikeya damns with faint praise by calling Kallis "the greatest batsman who can bowl" and highlights the oft-cited observation that Kallis never dominated series with both bat and ball, and the less often cited fact that Kallis bowled fewer overs per year than Sobers, Imran, Hadlee and Kapil.

Most of the all rounder arguments are caused by people refusing to accept that there is more than one kind of all rounder, and that the different types are impossible to compare.

Batting all rounders: Kallis and Sobers are the best of these. Steve Waugh, Carl Hooper, Tony Greig, Wally Hammond and Wilfred Rhodes are others on the list. Ravi Shastri, Sanath Jayasuriya, Bob Simpson, Ted Dexter and Frank Worrel probably are too. Through most of their careers their bowling effectiveness was secondary to their batting. This is the case even for Sobers, despite what Kartikeya would like to claim.

Bowling all rounders: Imran Kahn and Ian Botham head this list, others on it are Kapil Dev, Richard Hadlee, Shaun Pollock, Keith Miller, and Andrew Flintoff. These guys were bowlers first and foremost but could, at least for some of their career, hold their own with a bat.

Comparing the two types leads to endless debates of "Kallis wouldn't be picked for his bowling" versus "Imran wouldn't be picked for his batting". Both are partly true, but the comparison is meaningless. Wicket-taking bowlers win you cricket matches, which makes bowling all rounders arguably the most valuable type of player. This further confuses the all rounder argument.

Statistics aside, one department that Sobers clearly has Kallis' number is in charisma. Sobers was a a renowned entertainer, a dashing, well built athlete and hailed from the mysterious Caribbean. Although they will never admit it, I'll bet that all his detractors find it hard to stomach that the second best batting all rounder in history is a chubby balding Afrikaans guy from Pinelands with all the charisma of a fence post.