England's Greatest Wicketkeepers

England has had the same selection argument about wicketkeepers since the 1950s, and has never resolved it. On one side is the position that the keeper is a specialist and should be the best available at catching, taking and standing up, because dropped chances lose Tests. On the other is the position that a side needs runs from seven and that a keeper who averages forty is worth two hundred more runs a series than one who averages twenty-five, which is more than his errors will cost.

Both arguments have been proved right, repeatedly, by different selection panels in different decades. Alan Knott was picked ahead of a better keeper. Alec Stewart was picked ahead of a better keeper. Ben Foakes was dropped and recalled several times for the same reason. It is the most persistent structural argument in English selection, and it runs through every name below.

There is also a technical dimension that is specific to English conditions. A keeper here spends more time standing back to seamers moving the ball late off a Dukes seam than his Australian or Indian counterpart does, and less time standing up to spin. That changes what the job asks for, and it changes who is good at it.

Kent's three, in succession

Between the late 1920s and the late 1970s, three of the four best wicketkeepers England produced played for the same county. Kent's line of Les Ames, Godfrey Evans and Alan Knott is a coaching lineage rather than a coincidence, and nothing comparable exists anywhere else in English cricket.

Les Ames is the batting end of the argument in its purest form. He played 47 Tests for 2,434 runs at 40.56, and in first-class cricket scored 37,248 runs with 102 centuries — the only wicketkeeper in the game's history to reach a hundred first-class hundreds. He also holds the record for the most dismissals in an English county season, 127 in 1929, which disposes of the assumption that a keeper who bats like that cannot keep. In a Test in 1934 he scored 120 runs before lunch, still the record for a pre-lunch session. He was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1928, played professional football for Clapton Orient and Gillingham, and later managed Kent to the 1970 County Championship.

Godfrey Evans played 91 Tests between 1946 and 1959 and took 219 dismissals, 173 caught and 46 stumped, becoming the first wicketkeeper of any nation to reach two hundred in Tests. He was also the first English keeper to complete the doubles of a thousand runs with a hundred dismissals and then two thousand runs with two hundred, and he scored two Test centuries, both of exactly 104. Wisden's assessment was that he was arguably the best keeper the game had seen; Bill O'Reilly compared his movement to a fox terrier's. He was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1951.

Alan Knott has the strongest overall case of the three and possibly of anyone. In 95 Tests he made 4,389 runs at 32.75 with five centuries, including 135 in the 1977 Ashes, and took 250 catches and 19 stumpings. His 1,344 first-class dismissals rank fourth in history. He kept to Derek Underwood for a decade, which meant standing up on drying English pitches to a bowler who was almost unplayable on them, and he was named in Wisden's all-time Test World XI in 2013 and entered the ICC Hall of Fame in 2009. His Test career was cut short by a three-year ban after he joined World Series Cricket.

Bob Taylor, and the price of being second

Bob Taylor is the best pure wicketkeeper England has produced and played 57 Tests, which is the whole argument in one sentence. He took 2,069 first-class dismissals — 1,473 catches and 176 stumpings across 639 matches — more than any keeper in the history of first-class cricket, and he could not get into the England side because Alan Knott batted better.

He became first choice only when Knott went to World Series Cricket. In February 1980, in the Golden Jubilee Test at Bombay, he took ten dismissals in a match, seven in India's first innings and three in the second, a world record at the time. He finished with 167 Test catches and seven stumpings from those 57 appearances, a rate that suggests what the full career would have looked like.

Taylor's case is the strongest available to anyone arguing that England has systematically undervalued glovework. He was the best in the world at the specialist skill for most of a decade, and he spent that decade as a reserve.

Russell and Stewart

The 1990s version of the same argument was more public and more bitter. Jack Russell played 54 Tests between 1988 and 1998 and was, by broad agreement including Wisden's, the finest keeper in the world at the turn of the 1990s: the almanack made him a Cricketer of the Year in 1990 and observed that he was the only Englishman who could expect a place in anyone's World XI.

His two defining performances came in the same series. In December 1995 at Johannesburg he took eleven dismissals in a Test against South Africa, sharing the world record, in the match in which Michael Atherton batted for 643 minutes to save the game. Earlier, in the 1989 Ashes at Old Trafford, he made an unbeaten 128, his maiden Test century, which somewhat undercuts the idea that he could not bat. He conceded no byes at all while Northamptonshire declared on 746 for nine in 2002, which is an absurd statistic and a real one.

Alec Stewart got the job anyway. He played 133 Tests and 170 one-day internationals, scored 8,463 Test runs — the most by anyone in Test history without a double century — and made 190 against Pakistan in 1992, hundreds in both innings against the West Indies in 1994, and 105 in his hundredth Test in 2000. He captained England for about a year. He was also asked, at various points, to keep wicket and open the batting in the same Test, which is a workload no side should impose on one player and which England imposed repeatedly.

The honest verdict is that both selections were defensible in isolation and that the constant switching between them was not. England alternated between the two men for most of a decade and got the worst of both approaches.

Prior, and the keeper as a batter who happens to keep

Matt Prior settled the argument in the batting side's favour for a period, and it coincided with the strongest England Test side in modern memory.

He scored 126 not out on debut against the West Indies in May 2007, the first England keeper to make a century in his first Test, and finished with 4,099 runs at 40.18 from 79 Tests, plus 243 catches and 13 stumpings. His glovework was criticised early and improved substantially — he was left out of a tour of New Zealand in 2008 over it — and by the 2010-11 Ashes he was a genuinely competent keeper who scored quickly from No. 7 while England won in Australia. An Achilles injury ended his career in 2015.

Prior is the template for what England has looked for since: a keeper who counter-attacks at seven, turns 250 for six into 400, and does not cost the side more than a specialist would. Jonny Bairstow was picked on similar reasoning and shifted between keeping and batting for years as a result.

Keeper	Tests	Dismissals	Runs	Batting average
Les Ames	47	—	2,434	40.56
Godfrey Evans	91	219	—	—
Alan Knott	95	269	4,389	32.75
Bob Taylor	57	174	—	—
Jack Russell	54	—	—	—
Alec Stewart	133	—	8,463	—
Matt Prior	79	256	4,099	40.18

Sarah Taylor, the best of any of them

The most technically accomplished wicketkeeper England has produced is Sarah Taylor, and her standing is not seriously disputed by anyone who watched her.

She played from 2006 to 2019 across ten Tests, 126 one-day internationals and 90 Twenty20 internationals, having become the fastest cricketer of either sex to win a first cap in all three formats — nine days, in 2006. She made 4,056 one-day runs at 38.26 with seven centuries, and took 87 catches and 51 stumpings in that format. She won the World Cup in 2009 and again in 2017, and the World Twenty20 in 2009, and was ICC Women's T20I Cricketer of the Year in 2012 and 2013 and ODI Cricketer of the Year in 2014.

Her keeping standing up to spin, in particular the leg-side stumping, was of a standard rarely seen in either game. In 2015 she became the first woman to play men's grade cricket in Australia, and after retiring in 2019 for reasons she described openly as anxiety, she became Sussex's first female specialist coach in the senior men's set-up. The wider development of the side she played in is set out in the guide to England's women's cricket history.

What the job actually asks in England

The technique is different here, and it is worth being specific about why.

• Standing back to seam. Most English Test overs are bowled by seamers with a Dukes ball that swings and seams late. The keeper's problem is a ball that changes direction after it passes the bat, in low light, with slips beside him. Diving catches are the visible part; the difficult part is not committing early.
• Standing up to spin. Less common in England, but decisive when it happens — as it did for Knott to Underwood on wet pitches, and as it does now on the drier late-summer surfaces described in the guide to England's spin bowling challenge.
• Byes and the scoreboard. A keeper who concedes twenty byes an innings has given away a wicket's worth of runs without anyone noticing.
• Four days of concentration. In a County Championship season of thirty-odd days behind the stumps, keeping is an endurance discipline before it is a reflex one, a point developed in the guide to the art of wicketkeeping.

The current holder

Jamie Smith is the most gifted batter England has picked as a Test keeper. He made his debut against the West Indies at Lord's in July 2024, scored 70 in his first innings, made a maiden century of 111 against Sri Lanka at Old Trafford a month later, and in 2025 made an unbeaten 184 against India — the highest score by an England wicketkeeper in a Test. He was the Professional Cricketers' Association's young player of the year in 2024 and a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 2025.

Whether his keeping is of the same standard is the question England is currently choosing not to ask too loudly, which is exactly what it did with Ames, Knott, Stewart and Prior. Ben Foakes, the better specialist, was dropped and recalled more than once during the same period. The argument set out at the top of this page has not changed in seventy years; only the names have.

The order, and who is left out

Ranking keepers is harder than ranking batters because half the job is not in the scorecard. On the combination of both disciplines, Knott is first among the men and Sarah Taylor is first overall. Ames is next on batting weight, Evans on the strength of a reputation held by everyone who saw him, and Bob Taylor on glovework alone. Russell, Prior and Stewart follow, in an order that depends entirely on which side of the argument you take.

The main omissions are keepers whose Test careers were brief or whose selection was an expedient — the players used for a series while England changed its mind, of whom there have been many since 2015. Alec Stewart's inclusion is itself contestable, because he was a top-order batter who kept when asked rather than a keeper. For the batting end of the England record see the guides to England's greatest Test players and England's greatest opening batters, and for everything else in the English game start at the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

Career figures for each player are taken from published Test, first-class and limited-overs records, with dismissal totals stated as catches and stumpings where the split is documented and left blank in the table where a single reliable figure was not available. Season and match records — Ames's 127 dismissals in 1929, Bob Taylor's ten in a Test, Russell's eleven at Johannesburg — come from the relevant season and match records. Wisden Cricketer of the Year designations and ICC Hall of Fame entries are as published by those bodies. Assessments of keeping quality are editorial and drawn from contemporary published judgement rather than from any measurable statistic, and nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.