Pakistan's Greatest All-Rounders Ranked

Pakistan has produced more all-rounders than any comparably sized cricketing country, and it has also produced more arguments about what one is. The national selection habit has always been to ask a player to do two jobs, sometimes because the squad was short and sometimes because the player insisted, and the results range from the finest all-round Test career of the modern era to a long list of cricketers who bowled ten overs and batted at seven without being especially good at either.

The reason is partly structural. Domestic cricket in Pakistan, whether the departmental competitions of the second half of the twentieth century or the regional first-class game that succeeded them, has rewarded the useful player: a batter who could get through a spell in the heat when the frontline seamers were finished, a spinner who could hold up an end and make thirty. Add to that a habit of picking on talent rather than on record and you get careers that begin in one discipline and end in the other.

This page applies one test throughout, which is stated first because it determines who is here.

The test this list applies

A player qualifies if Pakistan would have picked him for either discipline on its own at the peak of his career. That excludes a great deal.

It excludes Sarfraz Nawaz and Waqar Younis, who were bowlers who batted. It excludes Javed Miandad, who bowled occasional leg-breaks and was a batter. It excludes the several batters who kept wicket, whose case belongs on the page about Pakistan's greatest wicketkeepers. It admits one player — Wasim Akram — whose batting alone would not have earned selection but whose contribution with it was large enough that leaving him out would misrepresent Pakistani cricket entirely.

Where a career divides sharply between formats, the format is named. A cricketer who was an all-rounder in Twenty20 and a batter in Tests is treated as the former.

Imran Khan, and the only complete case

Imran Khan finished with 3,807 Test runs at 37.69 and 362 wickets at 22.81 in 88 matches, with six centuries and twenty-three five-wicket hauls. He reached 3,000 runs and 300 wickets in 75 Tests, the third-fastest anyone has managed it and one of only eleven players to do it at all. His best figures, eight for 58, came against Sri Lanka in 1981-82.

The numbers understate him because of when they were made. Across the 1982-83 series against India he took forty wickets at 13.95, which remains one of the outstanding sustained fast-bowling performances in Test history, and in January 1983 he became only the second cricketer to score a century and take ten wickets in the same Test. Five of his six Test hundreds came while he was captain, and as captain he averaged around 52 with the bat and 20 with the ball — figures that look like a misprint and are not.

He led Pakistan in 48 Tests for fourteen wins and eight defeats, and his side won the 1992 World Cup, where he top-scored with 72 in the final and took the last wicket. His influence on the country's bowling is dealt with separately in the guide to the Pakistan fast bowling tradition; what belongs here is the simple point that he is the only Pakistani cricketer who would have walked into the side on either skill for the whole of his career.

Mushtaq Mohammad, and a hundred with five wickets at Port of Spain

Mushtaq Mohammad is the all-rounder most often left out of these conversations, which is odd given the record: 3,643 Test runs at 39.17 with ten centuries, and 79 wickets at 29.22 from leg-breaks, googlies and a flipper he used more than most wrist-spinners of the period. In first-class cricket, much of it for Northamptonshire, he took 936 wickets at 24.34.

He was the youngest player to appear in a Test at the time of his debut in 1959, and his first Test century, at seventeen years and seventy-eight days, stood as the youngest for more than forty years. His most complete match came as captain at Port of Spain in 1976-77, where he made 121 and 56 and took eight wickets in a Test Pakistan won — a rare home defeat for West Indies in that era, and one of the few instances after Garfield Sobers of a player scoring a century and taking five in an innings in the same match. The wrist-spin lineage he belongs to is traced in the guide to Pakistan's leg-spin tradition.

The 1967 Oval stand: Asif Iqbal and Intikhab Alam

Two careers are best explained together, because a single afternoon at The Oval in August 1967 defined both. Asif Iqbal, batting at nine, and Intikhab Alam, at ten, put on 190 for the ninth wicket, a world record that stood for around thirty years. Asif made 146 and, according to Wisden, was carried from the field by spectators who held the game up for five minutes.

Asif had begun as a swing bowler and moved up the order as back trouble reduced his bowling; he finished with 3,575 Test runs at 38.85 and eleven centuries from 58 Tests, alongside 53 wickets at 28.33, and he captained Pakistan at the 1975 and 1979 World Cups, reaching the semi-finals in the second. Intikhab went the other way and stayed a bowler, taking 125 Test wickets at 35.95 with 1,493 runs, and he captained Pakistan in 17 Tests before a long second career as coach and manager. Between them they are the clearest illustration of a Pakistani pattern: the discipline you are remembered for is often not the one you started with. Asif's batting is discussed further among the great middle-order batters.

Wasim Akram at number eight

Wasim Akram took 414 Test wickets at 23.62 and 502 in one-day internationals, the first bowler to reach 400 in both forms and the first to 500 in ODIs. He is on this page for what he did with a bat in October 1996, when he made 257 not out against Zimbabwe from 363 balls with twelve sixes — the highest score by a number eight in Test cricket, and the most sixes in a Test innings.

His Test batting average of 22.64 across 2,898 runs is the record of a genuine lower-order hitter rather than an all-rounder in the Imran sense, and it is the reason his inclusion needs the qualification set out above. But a bowler who can win a session with the bat changes how a captain uses his order, and Pakistan built lower orders around that assumption for a decade. The bowling itself, and the reverse swing that made it, are covered in the history of reverse swing.

Abdul Razzaq and Azhar Mahmood: the seam-bowling all-rounders

The late 1990s produced two players who did the specific job Pakistan needed — new-ball or first-change seam, and runs from six or seven.

Abdul Razzaq played 46 Tests for 1,946 runs at 28.62 with three centuries and exactly 100 wickets at 36.94, and 265 one-day internationals for 5,080 runs and 269 wickets. The Test bowling average is not distinguished; the ODI record of five thousand runs and better than 250 wickets is, and only a handful of cricketers in the game's history have both. He batted with an unhurried straightness that made him more reliable in a chase than his strike rate suggested.

Azhar Mahmood's Test career was shorter — 21 matches, 900 runs at 30.00, 39 wickets — and contains one of the odder facts in Pakistani cricket: all three of his Test centuries were made against South Africa, one of them on debut at Rawalpindi in 1997 and one an innings of 132 at Durban that Wisden rated among the best of its year. He then had one of the longest county and franchise careers of any Pakistani cricketer, which is what a genuinely two-skilled player was worth once Twenty20 arrived.

Shahid Afridi, and the argument that never closed

No Pakistani cricketer divides opinion like Shahid Afridi, and the reason is that his one-day record contains both an argument for and an argument against.

The case for: 8,064 runs and 395 wickets in 398 one-day internationals, plus 98 wickets in 99 Twenty20 internationals at 24.44 and the record for most sixes hit in ODI cricket. On debut-plus-one, in Nairobi in October 1996, he made a hundred from 37 balls with eleven sixes, then the fastest century in the format, and he was picked in that match as a leg-spinner.

The case against: an ODI batting average of 23.57 across two decades, and a Test career of 27 matches that produced five centuries at 36.51 and never settled. Afridi's leg-spin, quick and flat and heavily reliant on the ball that goes straight on, was the more valuable half of him for most of his career, and he was rarely selected as though that were true.

What is beyond argument is that Pakistan played him 398 times. A side does not do that with a luxury player.

Shoaib Malik and Mohammad Hafeez: two decades of usefulness

Both began as bowlers and finished as batters who bowled, and both lasted long enough to be picked by five or six different regimes.

Shoaib Malik's international career ran from 1999 to 2021: 7,534 ODI runs at 34.50 with nine centuries and 158 wickets, 2,435 T20I runs and 28 wickets, and 35 Tests. He modelled his off-spin on Saqlain Mushtaq, captained Pakistan for two years across all three formats, and batted at five different positions in Test cricket, which is either versatility or the absence of a settled plan depending on who is describing it.

Mohammad Hafeez has the better Test record of the two — 3,652 runs at 37.64 with ten centuries from 55 Tests, and 53 wickets — plus 6,614 ODI runs and 139 wickets, and 61 T20I wickets at 22.75. In January 2013 he was ranked the world's leading ODI all-rounder. His bowling was reported for an illegal action more than once and he was suspended and recalled repeatedly across a decade, which cost him both matches and the benefit of the doubt. Judged only on what he did when permitted to bowl, he was for several years the most valuable limited-overs cricketer Pakistan had.

The white-ball specialists, and Shadab Khan

The category Pakistan has filled most consistently since 2016 is the Twenty20 all-rounder: a spinner who can bowl in the powerplay and bat in the last five overs. Imad Wasim, slow left-arm and left-handed, built a career on bowling the first over of an innings at a run rate that made the field look wrong, and came out of retirement for the 2024 T20 World Cup.

Shadab Khan is the more complete of the current group. In March 2023 he became the first Pakistan man to take a hundred Twenty20 international wickets, reaching the mark against Afghanistan, and he has batted in the top six and at eight in the same year. He is also the clearest product of the Pakistan Super League, which selects for exactly this kind of cricketer and pays for him.

Whether any of them would have been picked as a Test all-rounder is a different question, and the honest answer is probably not. The format has separated the roles in a way it did not in Imran's time.

The ones outside, and what the list shows

Several near cases deserve naming. Faheem Ashraf has made Test runs and taken Test wickets in the same match without settling into either side of the team. Aamer Sohail bowled useful left-arm spin around a batting career. Wahab Riaz, Mohammad Nawaz and Iftikhar Ahmed have all been described as all-rounders by selectors and rarely by statisticians. The history of the captaincy shows how often Pakistan solved a balance problem by promoting one of them.

Read as a whole, the list divides at 1992. Before then, Pakistan's all-rounders were mostly spin-and-bat cricketers or fast-bowling captains, and they played Tests. After it, they were seam-and-bat or spin-and-slog cricketers, and the market for them moved to limited-overs cricket. Imran sits across the join, which is why nobody since has been compared to him usefully.

The individual records referred to here are collected in the player index, the terms used are defined in the cricket statistics glossary, and the rest of the Pakistani game sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

Career figures on this page are taken from published international career records and cross-checked against board and tournament documentation before being written here; where a player remains active, totals are described in a form that does not go out of date. Records described as records — the youngest Test centurion for over forty years, the highest score by a number eight, the first Pakistan man to a hundred T20I wickets — are those recorded as such in standard reference sources at the time they were set. Selection judgements in this article are editorial. The list is not derived from a formula, and it is not a computed ranking.