The beauty of cricket lies in the variety of different roles players can assume when they play the game. I contend there exists a continuum, with specialist bowlers at one end, specialist batsmen at the other, and a range of different types of allrounder in between. The terms "bowling allrounder" and "batting allrounder" are often used in reference to particular players, and it follows that in between these two categories, there must be a group of players whose allround capabilities are perfectly balanced; that is, they bat equally well as they bowl.
If my continuum does exist, then it should be possible to quantify each player's position along this line, and to determine who the "perfectly balanced" allrounders have been in the game's history.
Concerning myself with just Test cricket, I started with two extremes: the "purest" batsman was surely Brian Lara, who scored 11,953 runs in 131 Tests, but failed to take a wicket, the only scorer of 10,000 runs to do so. At the other end of the scale, we have South Africa's Mfuneko Ngam, who was only trusted with the bat once in his three Tests, scoring 0 not out, but was good enough as a bowler to take 11 wickets.
Of the 2551 Test players at the time of writing, 1085 failed either to score a run or take a wicket, and these may be regarded as our specialist players (either batsmen or bowlers), leaving 1467 players who can theoretically be regarded to some degree as allrounders. Readers may not be convinced of the allround credentials of Rahul Dravid, who has one wicket to go along with his 10,823 runs, and so we need to weed out these genuine batting specialists who by some freakish circumstance, have ended up with a small number of wickets.
Similarly, at the other end, we cannot seriously regard the likes of England's Bill Bowes (68 wickets) as a bowling allrounder, even though he scored 28 runs in 15 Tests, so from that end, we also need to establish a point beyond which a player can be regarded as a bowling specialist only, even though he may have scored the odd run here and there.
It will probably be obvious by now that the simplest (and perhaps most effective) way of establishing our continuum is to divide the number of runs a player has scored by the wickets he has taken. Using our two extremes, Dravid comes out with an allround index of 10823, while Bowes' is 0.41. The index for true allrounders, of course, lies within a much a narrower range, and with absolutely no theoretical basis for my conclusion, other than matching the results with my observations of players over many years, it seems that the figure of 14 is the point of equilibrium, where a player's batting is perfectly balanced with his bowling.
In fact no-one with 20 Tests under their belt has an index of exactly 14, but some come near. Of the megastars in the game's history, Ian Botham (13.58) comes the closest, while Jack Gregory (13.48), Ray Illingworth (15.05) and Chris Cairns (15.23) also seem to be extraordinarily balanced in their contributions with both bat and ball, the latter two obviously having a slight bias in favour of their batting. The closest with a 20-Test minimum is the little remembered nineteeth-century allrounder from England, William Barnes (14.22). The following table lists those whose indices lie in between 13 and 15:
Index player M runs wkts
13.02 Mankad, MH 44 2109 162
13.12 Boje, N 43 1312 100
13.39 Hirst, GH 24 790 59
13.48 Gregory, JM 24 1146 85
13.58 Botham, IT 102 5200 383
14.22 Barnes, W 21 725 51
14.37 Nasim-ul-Ghani 29 747 52
14.41 Ratnayeke, JR 22 807 56
14.68 Madan Lal, S 39 1042 71
How far can we deviate from this balanced centre before we can no longer call the player an allrounder? At the bowling end, the figure appears to be around 7. Wasim Akram comes in on exactly that figure, while Dominic Cork (6.60) and Ray Lindwall (6.59) just had too much fire-power with the ball compared to their output as batsmen to be considered genuine allrounders. Alan Davidson (7.14) and Richard Hadlee (7.46) are rightly included, as is the rapidly-improving Mitchell Johnson (7.38).
Index player M runs wkts
6.53 Wickramasinghe 40 555 85
6.59 Lindwall, RR 61 1502 228
6.60 Cork, DG 37 864 131
6.67 DeFreitas, PAJ 44 934 140
6.80 Schwarz, RO 20 374 55
6.91 Briggs, J 33 815 118
7.00 Wasim Akram 104 2898 414
7.00 Edmonds, PH 51 875 125
7.14 Cairns, BL 43 928 130
7.14 Davidson, AK 44 1328 186
7.25 Hadlee, RJ 86 3124 431
7.38 Johnson, MG 21 694 94
7.46 Hadlee, DR 26 530 71
At the other end, we probably need to wander much further from our centre to capture all those who we might consider batting allrounders. Extending the index from 14 to 100 allows the inclusion of Jeremy Coney (98.81), but excludes Doug Walters (109.33), which might be considered fair enough. Wally Hammond (87.34), Scott Styris (86.37) and Chris Gayle (77.49) are also included.
Index player M runs wkts
71.15 Jayasuriya, ST 110 6973 98
74.94 Hathurusingha 26 1274 17
75.47 Shoaib Malik 23 1132 15
76.33 McCabe, SJ 39 2748 36
77.49 Gayle, CH 82 5502 71
79.30 Styris, SB 29 1586 20
82.00 Ryder, J 20 1394 17
86.37 Cronje, WJ 68 3714 43
87.34 Hammond, WR 85 7249 83
92.20 Astle, NJ 81 4702 51
98.81 Coney, JV 52 2668 27
102.17 Wyatt, RES 40 1839 18
103.74 Umrigar, PR 59 3631 35
109.33 Walters, KD 74 5357 49
109.60 Hazare, VS 30 2192 20
Finally, there happen to be exactly 50 players whose indices fall in between 10 and 20 - these are the players who I consider to be closest to being perfectly balanced in their allround contributions.
Index player M runs wkts
10.52 Imran Khan 88 3807 362
10.59 Mohd Rafique 33 1059 100
10.67 Tapash Baisya 21 384 36
10.95 Boyce, KD 21 657 60
10.99 Vettori, DL 92 3220 293
11.05 Pathan, IK 29 1105 100
11.60 Knight, BR 29 812 70
11.63 Harper, RA 25 535 46
11.63 MacGibbon, AR 26 814 70
11.65 Emburey, JE 64 1713 147
11.88 Lewis, CC 32 1105 93
11.94 Intikhab Alam 47 1493 125
11.99 Strang, PA 24 839 70
12.02 Giffen, G 31 1238 103
12.09 Kapil Dev, N 131 5248 434
12.15 O'Keeffe, KJ 24 644 53
12.58 Dharmasena 31 868 69
13.02 Mankad, MH 44 2109 162
13.12 Boje, N 43 1312 100
13.39 Hirst, GH 24 790 59
13.48 Gregory, JM 24 1146 85
13.58 Botham, IT 102 5200 383
14.22 Barnes, W 21 725 51
14.37 Nasim-ul-Ghani 29 747 52
14.41 Ratnayeke, JR 22 807 56
14.68 Madan Lal, S 39 1042 71
15.05 Illingworth, R 61 1836 122
15.06 Holford, DAJ 24 768 51
15.23 Cairns, CL 62 3320 218
16.00 Patel, DN 37 1200 75
16.03 Durani, SA 29 1202 75
16.07 Nadkarni, RG 41 1414 88
16.31 Brown, FR 22 734 45
16.50 Noble, MA 42 1997 121
16.67 Prabhakar, M 39 1600 96
16.72 Flintoff, A 75 3645 218
16.89 Hall, AJ 21 760 45
16.97 Sinclair, JH 25 1069 63
17.32 Julien, BD 24 866 50
17.35 Bailey, TE 61 2290 132
17.40 Miller, KR 55 2958 170
17.66 Binny, RMH 27 830 47
17.83 White, C 30 1052 59
18.31 Rhodes, W 58 2325 127
18.98 Ulyett, G 25 949 50
19.46 Abdul Razzaq 46 1946 100
19.51 Amarnath, L 24 878 45
19.58 Hopkins, AJY 20 509 26
19.62 Atkinson, DStE 22 922 47
19.82 Phadkar, DG 31 1229 62
So there we have it: a classification of players into five groups, Bowlers (Indices 0 to 7), Bowling Allrounders (7 to 10), Balanced Allrounders (10 to 20), Batting Allrounders (20 to 100) and Batsmen (above 100). These boundaries are purely subjective, and will no doubt promote some comment - but don't forget, this is NOT an analysis of who the BEST allrounders are!