Australia's Greatest All-Rounders: A History

Australia has produced fast bowlers in industrial quantities and batters good enough to open in any era. All-rounders are the position it has struggled with, and the struggle has a specific date attached to it. Keith Miller played his last Test in 1956, and Australian selectors have been looking for a replacement more or less continuously ever since — through the Benaud and Davidson years, through the Packer split, through two decades of world dominance in which the side simply picked four bowlers and six batters and won anyway, and into the current era of the tall seam-bowling batter.

The scarcity is worth explaining before the list starts. A country that produces genuinely fast bowling tends to produce specialists, because bowling fast for a living is not compatible with batting in the top five. And a country with the batting depth Australia has usually had does not need a number seven who makes runs; it needs a fourth bowler who takes wickets. Those two facts together mean the Australian all-rounder has usually been a bowler who could bat rather than a batter who could bowl, which makes this a different list from an English or a Pakistani one.

It also means the strongest set of all-round numbers any Australian has produced belong to a woman who played for the national side at sixteen.

What counts here

The test applied on this page is straightforward: would the player have been picked for one discipline alone, and did selectors in fact rely on both? That excludes the batter who bowled twelve overs a series and the bowler who once made a hundred, and it excludes an enormous number of useful cricketers.

It also means the list is a mix of types. Some of these players were front-line bowlers who batted in the top six. Some were batters whose bowling was a genuine option rather than a courtesy. What they share is that a captain could take a wicket-taking spell and a substantial innings from the same person in the same match.

Giffen and Noble: the all-rounder as most of the side

Australian cricket's earliest sides were small, and their best cricketers were expected to do everything. George Giffen of South Australia, who played 31 Tests between 1881 and 1896, is the founding example. He made 1,238 runs at 23.35 and took 103 wickets at 27.09, which made him the first player in Test history to complete the double of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets.

The Test figures understate him considerably. In first-class cricket he made 11,758 runs and took 1,023 wickets at 21.29 — a genuine double-thousand career — and against Victoria in 1891 he scored 271, then took 9 for 96 and 7 for 70. Nine times in his career he combined a century with ten or more wickets in the same match, which nobody else has approached. He captained Australia during the 1894-95 Ashes and has a statue at Adelaide Oval.

Monty Noble, who followed him, was the more complete Test cricketer. In 42 Tests between 1898 and 1909 he made 1,997 runs at 30.25 and took 121 wickets at 25.00, bowling medium pace and off-breaks and batting with a defence contemporaries described as almost unbreakable. He captained Australia in fifteen Tests for eight wins, and in 1902 his 284 in a first-class match produced a then world-record partnership of 428 with Warwick Armstrong. He was a dentist by profession and wrote several books on the game.

Armstrong and Gregory: two ways of doing it

Armstrong himself belongs on the list, and as a leg-spinning batter he is a type Australia has rarely produced since. Fifty Tests between 1902 and 1921 brought 2,863 runs at 38.68 with six centuries and 87 wickets at 33.59. He captained in ten Tests without losing one — eight wins and two draws — and led the 5-0 Ashes whitewash of 1920-21, in which he personally made 474 runs at better than 77 with three centuries. He stood six foot three, weighed twenty-one stone at his heaviest, was known as the Big Ship, and was as difficult an opponent off the field as on it. His leg-spin was accurate rather than vicious, which places him in a tradition covered separately in the guide to Australia's leg-spin tradition.

Jack Gregory was the opposite kind of cricketer: a genuinely fast bowler who batted left-handed, without gloves for much of his career, and hit the ball extremely hard. In 24 Tests between 1920 and 1928 he averaged 36.50 with two centuries, and one of those remains a record — at Johannesburg in 1921 he reached a hundred in 67 balls and seventy minutes, and while the ball-count was eventually beaten, the seventy minutes has not been. His best return with the ball was 7 for 69 against England. He also took fifteen catches in the 1920-21 Ashes, still the most by a fielder in a Test series, and his career ended on a knee injury at Brisbane in 1928.

Keith Miller

Miller is where the argument stops, and it stops for statistical reasons as much as romantic ones. In 55 Tests between 1946 and 1956 he made 2,958 runs at 36.97 with seven centuries and took 170 wickets at 22.97. When he retired, no all-rounder in the history of the game had a better set of figures.

He was also a considerable first-class cricketer beyond the Tests: 226 matches, 14,183 runs at 48.90 with 41 centuries, and 497 wickets at 22.30. On the 1948 tour of England he made 1,088 runs at 47.30 and took 56 wickets at 17.58, which is a season's work for two players. In the 1946-47 Ashes he made 384 runs at 76.80 and took 16 wickets at 20.88. He batted as high as number three, opened the bowling in one of the most feared new-ball partnerships the game has had, and caught almost anything in the slips.

The case against him is that his Test batting average sits below forty and his bowling average above twenty, so that on paper he is not quite the equal of the very best specialists in either discipline. The case for him is that no other Australian has done both jobs at that level in the same match for a decade. He sits in most versions of Australia's greatest Test XI on that basis.

Benaud, Davidson and the bowler who batted

The pair who followed represent the Australian variant of the role: front-line bowlers whose batting was substantial enough to change matches.

Richie Benaud played 63 Tests between 1952 and 1964, taking 248 wickets at 27.03 and making 2,201 runs at 24.45, with a highest score of 122 against South Africa and a best return of 7 for 72 against India. In 1963 he became the first cricketer to reach both 200 Test wickets and 2,000 Test runs. As captain across 28 Tests he won twelve and lost four and never lost a series, which is a large part of why Australian cricket recovered when it did.

Alan Davidson was the better bowler and the more improbable all-rounder. In 44 Tests between 1953 and 1963 he took 186 wickets at 20.53, and from the 1957-58 season onwards — the point at which he became Australia's leading bowler — he took 170 wickets at 19.25 in 32 matches. He and Benaud took 333 wickets in the Tests they played together.

His defining performance was the Tied Test at Brisbane in 1960-61, where he became the first player in Test history to take ten wickets and score more than a hundred runs in the same match, finishing with eleven wickets and an innings of 80 while bowling with a broken finger. He was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1962 and entered the ICC Hall of Fame in 2011.

Forty years of looking

From the mid-1960s the position went quiet, and Australian cricket spent a very long time auditioning for it.

Some of the candidates were genuine limited-overs cricketers whose Test claims were thinner — Simon O'Donnell and Tom Moody among them. Steve Waugh began as a medium-pacer who batted and ended as one of the great Test batters who barely bowled, which is a career trajectory rather than an all-round record. Greg Matthews bowled spin and batted usefully without ever quite convincing selectors of either. Andrew Symonds was a formidable one-day cricketer and an occasionally devastating Test batter whose bowling was a fifth option.

None of this was a crisis, because the sides of the 1990s and 2000s did not need solving. When your attack is McGrath, Warne, Gillespie and a fourth quick, and your top six averages what those top sixes averaged, an all-rounder is a luxury. The consequence is that Australia went from Davidson to Watson without a settled Test all-rounder, and the specialists who filled the gap are covered in the survey of Australia's greatest fast bowlers.

Watson, and the most-selected all-rounder Australia has had

Shane Watson played international cricket from 2002 to 2016 and was picked as an all-rounder in all three formats for most of it, which no Australian before him had managed.

His Test record was 59 matches, 3,731 runs at 35.19 with four centuries, and 75 wickets at 33.68 with a best of 6 for 33. In one-day cricket the numbers are considerably better: 190 matches, 5,757 runs at 40.54 with nine centuries, and 168 wickets at 31.79. He held the number one Twenty20 international all-rounder ranking for 150 weeks in total, including 120 consecutive weeks from late 2011 to early 2014. He won two World Cups and two Champions Trophies, taking the player-of-the-match award in both Champions Trophy finals. In 2011 against Bangladesh he made 185 from 96 balls with fifteen sixes, and in January 2016 he became the first Australian to score international centuries in all three formats.

The criticism of him at the time was persistent: too many scores in the thirties and forties, too many lbw dismissals, a body that would not sustain long bowling spells. Two decades on the record reads better than the reputation did. A man who averaged forty and took 168 wickets in one-day internationals, and who was a Test opener for long stretches while bowling first change, was doing something very few cricketers can.

Ellyse Perry

On the evidence, the best all-round cricketer Australia has produced is Ellyse Perry, and it is not an especially close argument.

Her Test record stands at 13 matches with more than 900 runs at an average above 60, two centuries, and 39 wickets at 21.82. The centuries include 213 not out against England in 2017, the highest score by an Australian woman in Test cricket, made in an innings where no team-mate passed 47. In one-day internationals she has made close to four thousand runs at better than 50 and taken 165 wickets at 25.13. In Twenty20 internationals she has over two thousand runs and 136 wickets at 18.78. Those are front-line figures in both disciplines in all three formats.

She debuted for Australia at sixteen years and eight months, the youngest cricketer to do so for the country, and played for the national football team as well, making her the first Australian to appear at both an ICC and a FIFA World Cup. She has won the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Award and the Belinda Clark Award three times each and was named among Wisden's five cricketers of the decade for 2010-19.

Anyone comparing her figures with Miller's has to reckon with different eras and different standards of opposition, which is a real objection. It is also the objection that applies to every comparison on this page.

What the list says

Read end to end, the Australian all-round tradition has three phases and one interruption.

Era	Type of all-rounder
1880s to 1920s	Cricketers expected to bowl long spells and bat high, because squads were small
1940s to 1960s	The genuine article: Miller, then Benaud and Davidson as bowlers who batted seriously
1965 to 2000s	Effectively vacant; strong specialist sides did not require the position
2000s onwards	Watson as a selected all-rounder in three formats, and the tall seam-bowling batter as the current model

The present generation continues the last of those. Cameron Green and Mitchell Marsh both bat in the top six and bowl at genuine pace, Glenn Maxwell has been a white-ball match-winner with bat and off-spin for over a decade, and Beau Webster arrived as a batter who bowls both seam and spin. Whether any of them ends up in the paragraph above depends on fitness more than talent, which has always been the all-rounder's problem.

The wider structures that produce these players — the state competition, the pathway and the culture that values a fourth seamer who can bat — are covered in the guides to the Sheffield Shield and the club cricket system. For the batters at the other end of the order, see Australia's great opening batters; for what the cap they all wore means, the history of the baggy green; and for the rest of the Australian game, the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

Career figures are taken from published career records and cross-checked against biographical accounts of each player; Test and first-class statistics for retired cricketers are stable and quoted exactly, while figures for players still active are described in general terms because they move. Series aggregates, records and honours follow Wisden, ICC Hall of Fame citations and Australian Cricket Hall of Fame material. The selection criterion stated at the top is this page's own, and the ranking implied by the order of the sections is an argument rather than a calculation. Comparisons across eras are offered with the caveat that opposition strength, pitch preparation and workload differed substantially between them.