England's Greatest Cricket Allrounders

England has a measurement for allrounders that no other country uses, because no other country's domestic season is shaped the way the county season is. The double — a thousand runs and a hundred wickets in the same English summer — required a player to bat in the top six and bowl twenty overs a day across roughly thirty matches between May and September. It was possible because the fixture list was absurdly long, and it stopped being possible when the fixture list shortened and specialisation arrived.

That single yardstick explains why English discussion of allrounders is usually an argument between two eras rather than a ranking. Wilfred Rhodes completed the double sixteen times. Ian Botham never completed it once, because by the 1980s nobody played enough county cricket to try. Judging them by the same standard is meaningless, which is why this page uses different standards for different periods and says which one it is applying each time.

The players below are assessed on whether they were genuinely selected for both disciplines and would have held a place in an England side for either one alone. That test excludes a good many popular choices and includes two women whose records stand comparison with any of the men.

Rhodes and Hirst: the standard, set in Yorkshire

The two men who defined the English allrounder played for the same county at the same time, which has never happened again.

Wilfred Rhodes played 58 Tests between 1899 and 1930, scoring 2,325 runs and taking 127 wickets, and became the first Englishman to complete the Test double of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets. Those numbers understate him badly. In first-class cricket he holds two world records that will not be broken: 1,110 appearances and 4,204 wickets, at just under seventeen runs each, alongside 39,969 runs. He began as a slow left-armer, developed into a batter good enough to open the Test innings with Jack Hobbs, and after the First World War went back to bowling as a front-line spinner. He was in the England side that regained the Ashes in 1926 at 48, and in 1930 became the oldest Test cricketer at 52 years and 165 days.

George Hirst is the harder case and the more remarkable season. His Test record is thin — 24 matches, 790 runs at 22.57, 59 wickets at 30.00 — and by modern criteria he would not make a list of England's best. What he did in county cricket is unmatched: in 1906 he scored 2,385 runs at 45.86 and took 208 wickets at 16.50, the only instance of two thousand runs and two hundred wickets in an English season, and a feat cricket writers of the period compared only to W G Grace's in the 1870s. He completed the ordinary double fourteen times, second only to Rhodes. Over 826 first-class matches he made 36,356 runs and took 2,742 wickets, and then coached at Eton for eighteen years.

Both cases show why the County Championship sits underneath any English discussion of the subject. Rhodes and Hirst were products of a competition that asked players to do everything for five months.

Woolley, and the third discipline

Frank Woolley of Kent played from 1906 to 1938 and is the most complete cricketer England has produced in the sense of doing three things at once.

In 978 first-class matches he scored 58,959 runs at 40.77 with 145 centuries — a career aggregate second only to Hobbs — took 2,066 wickets at 19.87 with his slow left-arm, and held 1,018 catches. He remains the only non-wicketkeeper in the history of the game to catch a thousand. He completed the double eight times.

His Test record is respectable rather than commanding: 64 matches, 3,283 runs at 36.07 with five hundreds, and 83 wickets. But the fielding matters to the assessment, because an allrounder's value is total value, and a slip who takes everything is worth more than the difference between two bowling averages. Woolley was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1911 and entered the ICC Hall of Fame in 2009.

Between the wars, and the seam-bowling model

Maurice Tate of Sussex is usually filed as a bowler, which is how his own generation eventually thought of him too, but he was picked to do both and did. In 39 Tests he took 155 wickets and scored 1,198 runs including a century. On the 1924-25 tour of Australia he took 38 wickets, then the most by an Englishman on an Ashes tour of Australia.

Tate matters here because he is the first recognisable version of the model England has relied on ever since: a genuinely quick or fast-medium bowler who bats in the middle order rather than a spinner who bats up top. Rhodes, Hirst and Woolley were all slow left-armers. Everyone England has built a side around since — Botham, Flintoff, Stokes — has bowled seam, which is a consequence of what English pitches and the Dukes ball reward. The tradition that produced them is set out in the guide to England's fast bowling.

Bailey and Greig: two answers to the same problem

Trevor Bailey played 61 Tests between 1949 and 1959, scoring 2,290 runs at 29.74 and taking 132 wickets at 29.21. He was called Barnacle for reasons the record makes obvious: in the 1953 Ashes at Lord's he and Willie Watson batted through most of a final day to save a Test England should have lost, Bailey taking 257 minutes over 71 runs. He also took seven for 34 against the West Indies in 1953-54 to win a match. Across 682 first-class games he made 28,641 runs and took 2,082 wickets, then spent 26 years on Test Match Special.

Tony Greig, two decades later, was the opposite kind of cricketer with a better set of numbers: 58 Tests, 3,599 runs at 40.43, 141 wickets at 32.20, and the England captaincy for fourteen matches. A batting average above forty combined with more than 140 wickets is a genuinely elite allround return, and Greig is consistently underrated in England because of his role in recruiting players for World Series Cricket, which ended his international career. The cricket and the politics are separable, and on the cricket he belongs in the top four or five.

Botham

Ian Botham played 102 Tests between 1976 and 1992: 5,200 runs at 33.54 with 14 centuries and a highest score of 208, and 383 wickets at 28.40 with a best of eight for 34 and ten wickets in a match four times. He also took 120 catches. He held the world record for Test wickets from August 1986 until Richard Hadlee passed him in November 1988.

The statistical case rests on the first five years rather than the whole career. Botham's bowling average deteriorated substantially after a back injury in the early 1980s, and a career average of 33.54 with the bat is good for a bowler and modest for a specialist batter. What is not in dispute is what he did between 1977 and 1982, when he was the best cricketer in the world by a distance, and in 1980 became the first man to score a century and take ten wickets in the same Test.

The 1981 Ashes is where the reputation was made, and the numbers there are extraordinary in a way the career figures are not. His place in the wider Ashes story is covered in the guide to the Ashes. Nobody in England argues about whether Botham was a great allrounder; the argument is only about whether he was the greatest, and it is usually conducted between people who saw him and people who read about him.

Flintoff, Stokes, and the modern version

Andrew Flintoff played 79 Tests for 3,845 runs with five hundreds and 226 wickets. He was, for one series, as influential as any English cricketer has been: in the 2005 Ashes he made 402 runs and took 24 wickets as England won the urn for the first time since 1986-87. He was also injured for large parts of his career, which is the recurring cost of the model — a fast bowler who bats in the top six breaks down.

Ben Stokes is the most complete of them and the one with the best claim to be England's greatest allrounder on the numbers. He made his Test debut at Adelaide in December 2013, captained England from 2022, and retired from international cricket on 28 June 2026, announcing it during the fourth day of the third Test against New Zealand at Trent Bridge, then taking a wicket with his next ball. He finished past 120 Tests with more than seven thousand runs and more than two hundred wickets, making him one of only three men to reach both marks, alongside Garry Sobers and Jacques Kallis.

The individual innings are the reason he is remembered rather than the aggregates. His 258 at Cape Town in 2016 was the fastest double century by an England batter in Test cricket. His unbeaten 84 in the 2019 World Cup final won a tournament England had spent four years planning for, and five weeks later he made an unbeaten 135 at Headingley to win an Ashes Test from a position that was lost. Career figures do not capture a player whose value was concentrated in the matches that decided series.

Player	Tests	Runs	Wickets	Distinguishing claim
Wilfred Rhodes	58	2,325	127	4,204 first-class wickets; sixteen doubles
George Hirst	24	790	59	2,385 runs and 208 wickets in 1906
Frank Woolley	64	3,283	83	58,959 runs, 2,066 wickets, 1,018 catches
Maurice Tate	39	1,198	155	38 wickets on the 1924-25 Ashes tour
Trevor Bailey	61	2,290	132	Saved the 1953 Lord's Test; 7 for 34 in the Caribbean
Tony Greig	58	3,599	141	Batting average above forty with 141 wickets
Ian Botham	102	5,200	383	First man with a hundred and ten wickets in a Test
Andrew Flintoff	79	3,845	226	402 runs and 24 wickets in the 2005 Ashes
Ben Stokes	120-plus	7,000-plus	200-plus	Third man to the 7,000-run, 200-wicket double

The spinners, and the awkward case of Woakes

Moeen Ali finished with 3,094 runs and 204 wickets in 68 Tests, retiring from the format after the drawn 2023 Ashes. Those are allrounder numbers by any definition, and he is nonetheless rarely included in lists of this kind, because he was selected as a batter who bowled, then as a bowler who batted, then as an emergency option, and never had a settled role. He himself has said the batting suffered from not knowing what the job was. On output he outranks several players who are routinely named ahead of him.

Chris Woakes is the reverse problem: a bowler whose batting was good enough to be genuinely useful, with 2,034 runs at 25.11 and 192 wickets at 29.61 from 62 Tests before he retired from international cricket in September 2025. His claim is a curiosity that happens to be a real distinction — he appears on both honours boards at Lord's, for an unbeaten 137 against India in 2018 and for match figures of eleven for 102 against Pakistan in 2016, something only around ten cricketers have managed. He is not a great allrounder. He is the best illustration of how much a No. 8 who can bat changes an England side.

The women's record, which is stronger

Enid Bakewell's figures are the best allround Test numbers any English cricketer has: in twelve Tests she scored 1,078 runs at 59.88 with four centuries and took 50 wickets at under seventeen with her slow left-arm.

She also got somewhere before Botham did. In 1979, against the West Indies and in what turned out to be her final Test, Bakewell scored a century and took ten wickets in the same match — the first English cricketer of either sex to do it, several months before Botham's more famous version of the same feat.

Nat Sciver-Brunt is the modern equivalent and has done it across three formats. She has passed four thousand one-day international runs with ten centuries and is approaching ninety wickets in that format, with a comparable record in Twenty20 internationals, and she scored the fastest century in the history of women's Test cricket, from 96 balls, in December 2024. She was the first England cricketer to take a hat-trick in a women's T20 international, was named ICC Women's Cricketer of the Year in both 2022 and 2023, and captained England at the 2025 World Cup. The longer story of the side she leads is in the guide to England's women's cricket history.

Ranking them, and who is left out

Any order is arguable. On weight of achievement across a whole career, Rhodes is first, because two world records in first-class cricket and a Test career spanning thirty-one years is not a thing anyone else has. On the combination of Test output and impact, Stokes is first, and on peak alone, Botham is.

• Rhodes, for the totality of it.
• Stokes, for the best Test allround record England has produced.
• Botham, for a five-year peak nobody has matched.
• Woolley, once fielding is counted properly.
• Greig, the most underrated.
• Bakewell, on the best allround Test figures of any of them.

The notable omissions are men whose reputations exceed their records. W G Grace belongs in a different discussion, because the standard of the bowling he faced and the cricket he played cannot be compared usefully with anything after him. Stuart Broad and other lower-order batters who made hundreds were bowlers who could bat. Several 1980s and 1990s players were selected as allrounders on hope rather than evidence, and their figures show it.

For England's best specialists rather than its dual-purpose cricketers, see the guide to England's greatest Test players; for the domestic competition that produced most of the names above, and everything else in the English game, begin at the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

Career figures here are taken from published Test and first-class records for each player named, cross-checked against ICC Hall of Fame biographies and Wisden's own notices where those exist. Season figures for the doubles, including Hirst's 1906 aggregate, come from county season records. Where a career is still open or a total moves — as with contemporary players' limited-overs aggregates — the figure is given as a threshold passed rather than a precise number. The ranking at the end is an editorial judgement and is described as such; it is not the output of any weighting model, and no figure on this page is computed from our own datasets.