In search of the balanced allrounder
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:
.........
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!
Blogs: In search of the balanced allrounder | Cricket Blogs | ESPN Cricinfo
