South Africa's Greatest All-Rounders, Ranked and Explained

Aubrey Faulkner is the only cricketer to finish a Test career with a batting average above forty and a bowling average below thirty. Mike Procter played seven Tests, took forty-one wickets at just over fifteen, and never played another because his country was expelled from international cricket. Jacques Kallis scored more than thirteen thousand Test runs and took nearly three hundred wickets and is still argued about, because for the last third of his career he barely bowled. South Africa's all-rounder tradition is not a smooth line of succession. It is a series of interruptions, most of them not the players' fault.

The country has produced them out of proportion to its population, and the reason is partly structural. Provincial cricket in South Africa was played by small squads on fast, bouncy pitches, and a young player who could both bat in the top six and bowl fifteen overs of lively seam was more useful to a Currie Cup side than a specialist. That incentive ran from the 1890s to the 1990s and it shows in the record. What follows is an account of the men and one woman who did both jobs at the highest level, in the order the game encountered them.

The organising question throughout is a simple one: would the player have been picked for one discipline alone? A genuine all-rounder answers yes twice. Most of the names below do; a couple are here on a narrower claim, and that is stated where it applies.

What is being counted, and what is not

There is a category error worth clearing up first. A bowler who bats usefully at eight is not an all-rounder, however many rearguard fifties he makes, and a batter who takes the occasional wicket with part-time seam is not one either. The test used on this page is whether the player was routinely selected to perform both functions and did both to international standard over a career, not in a single series.

That excludes some popular names. Trevor Goddard is a borderline case and is included, because he opened the batting and bowled left-arm seam in the same match, in the same series, for years. Albie Morkel and Chris Morris were valuable T20 cricketers whose claim rests almost entirely on the short format. Dale Steyn and Allan Donald belong in the fast bowling tradition and Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock in the great batters.

Sinclair, who scored the country's first hundred

Jimmy Sinclair was a large man who hit the ball extremely hard and bowled fast-medium, and he arrived in a South African side that had never made a Test century. At Cape Town in April 1899 he made 106, the first hundred by a South African in Test cricket, and in the same series he became the first cricketer of any nationality to score a century and take five wickets in an innings in the same Test, having taken six for thirty in England's first innings before he batted. He went on to make the first three Test centuries in the country's history.

Sinclair's numbers, read cold, are not impressive: South Africa lost almost everything they played in that period, and his figures are those of a good player in a weak side. What matters is that the template existed from the beginning. The country's first significant batter was also a bowler.

Faulkner, the googly and the 1910-11 tour

Aubrey Faulkner is the strongest all-round claim in South African cricket and one of the strongest anywhere. He was among the first bowlers to master the googly, and unusually he bowled it fast, which made it far harder to pick than the loopier versions being tried at the time. He was also a genuine top-order batter.

The tour that established him was South Africa's first visit to Australia, in 1910-11. South Africa lost the series heavily, four Tests to one. Faulkner scored 732 runs in the five matches at better than seventy an innings, with two centuries — one of them 204 at Melbourne, the first double century by a South African in Tests — and five fifties, and he took ten wickets. It is one of the great individual tours by a losing player.

Faulkner is in the ICC Hall of Fame and is still the only man to have finished with a Test batting average over forty and a bowling average under thirty. Both those figures are drawn from a career of only a couple of dozen Tests, which is a caveat worth stating; the caveat does not make the achievement less unusual, because nobody with a longer career has managed it either. He served in the First World War, later ran a celebrated cricket school in England, and died in 1930.

Barlow and Procter: the two whose careers were cut off

Eddie Barlow played thirty Tests, averaged in the mid-forties with the bat and took forty wickets at around thirty-four. Those are the numbers of a top-order batter who bowled a proper spell, and they understate him, because he was also the competitive engine of the side that beat Australia in 1966-67 and 1969-70. He opened, he bowled into the wind, and he was the man his captains turned to when a partnership needed breaking.

Mike Procter's record is the cruellest in this whole subject. He played seven Tests, all against Australia across those same two series, and took forty-one wickets at just over fifteen apiece, bowling fast seam and swing off what looked like the wrong foot. His best figures, six for seventy-three, came in the second innings of his final Test at Port Elizabeth. South Africa won six of his seven matches and drew the other. Then the door shut. Procter spent the rest of his career at Gloucestershire and in Currie Cup cricket, where he was so dominant that the county nicknamed itself after him, and he never played another Test. He died in 2024.

The mechanism that ended those careers, and what it did to a generation, is set out in isolation and readmission. Procter and Barlow are the reason South African supporters of a certain age treat statistical comparison with suspicion: the numbers that would have settled the argument were never allowed to accumulate.

Rice, and a career played almost entirely in England

Clive Rice never played a Test. He began at Transvaal in 1969, was selected for a tour of Australia that was cancelled, and by the time South Africa returned he was in his forties. What he did instead was become one of the outstanding all-rounders in county cricket. He joined Nottinghamshire in 1975 as the replacement for Garry Sobers, captained the club from 1979, and led it to the County Championship in 1981 and again in 1987, being named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year for the first of those. He finished his first-class career averaging around forty-one with the bat and around twenty-two with the ball.

At home he captained the Transvaal side of the early 1980s that dominated the Currie Cup, a team good enough that it acquired a nickname of its own. When readmission finally came he led South Africa in the reconciliation one-day matches in India in 1991, which gave him an international captaincy of a few days at an age when most players have retired. The provincial context for that era is covered in the history of provincial cricket.

Kallis, and the argument about the category

Jacques Kallis played 166 Tests, scored 13,289 runs at 55.37 with forty-five centuries, took 292 wickets and held 200 catches. No other cricketer has combined run-scoring on that scale with a bowling return anywhere close to it. He made a century in his final Test innings, against India at Durban in 2013.

The objection to calling him a great all-rounder is real and should be stated fairly. For long stretches, particularly after 2008, Kallis's back and knees restricted him to short spells or none at all, and South Africa's attack was strong enough that they did not need him. Judged as a bowler over his whole career he was a genuine third or fourth seamer who moved the ball both ways at a lively pace and produced important wickets, not a strike bowler. Judged over the first half of it he was much more than that.

The fairer summary is that Kallis was the best batter South Africa has produced since readmission and, for about a decade, also a Test-quality seamer, and that no combination of those two things at that scale exists anywhere else in the game's records. Whether that makes him an all-rounder or a batter with an unusually good second discipline is a question about definitions rather than about him.

Pollock, McMillan and Klusener

The readmission generation produced three all-rounders of quite different types. Shaun Pollock played 108 Tests, took 421 wickets — the South African record until Steyn passed it in 2018 — and scored 3,781 runs. His batting was the lesser half but it was not a courtesy: he made runs from number eight or nine that repeatedly turned narrow positions, and in one-day cricket he was a legitimate finisher. He was also, briefly, the captain, in the worst possible circumstances.

Brian McMillan was a large, hostile presence who batted in the middle order, bowled genuine seam and caught everything in the gully. He was central to the side that returned at the 1992 World Cup, described in the 1992 World Cup return, and his value was as much in the balance he gave the XI as in his own figures.

Lance Klusener was the most spectacular of the three. He took eight for sixty-four on Test debut against India at Calcutta in 1996, a left-arm quick bowling reverse swing at a pace that surprised everyone including the selectors, and he later reinvented himself as a one-day batter who hit the ball flat and very hard with a bat that looked too heavy to lift. At the 1999 World Cup he made 281 runs at around 140 and took seventeen wickets, winning four match awards, and then found himself at the wrong end of the run-out that ended the 1999 World Cup semi-final. It is a harsh thing for a tournament like that to be remembered by.

Player	Era	The two-discipline case
Jimmy Sinclair	1890s-1910s	First SA Test century; century and five-for in a Test
Aubrey Faulkner	1900s-1920s	732 runs and two centuries on the 1910-11 Australia tour
Eddie Barlow	1960s-1970	Batting average in the mid-forties, forty Test wickets
Mike Procter	1966-1970	41 wickets at just over 15 from seven Tests
Clive Rice	1970s-1980s	Two County Championships as Nottinghamshire captain
Brian McMillan	1990s	Middle-order runs, genuine seam, gully catching
Shaun Pollock	1995-2008	421 Test wickets and nearly 3,800 runs
Lance Klusener	1996-2004	Eight-for on debut; the 1999 World Cup with the bat
Jacques Kallis	1995-2013	13,289 runs and 292 wickets in 166 Tests

Kapp, and the women's side of the record

Marizanne Kapp is the most complete all-rounder South Africa has produced in the women's game and belongs in any honest list of the country's all-rounders rather than in a separate one. She made her international debut at the 2009 World Cup in Australia and has spent the years since opening the bowling and batting in the top half of the order, in all three formats and in every major franchise competition. Her seam bowling is the more valuable half — she takes the new ball, moves it away from the right-hander and bowls at the top of the innings and at the death — but she has made international centuries as well.

Kapp's career overlaps almost exactly with the professionalisation of the women's game in South Africa, and her longevity across that transition is part of why she matters. The broader arc is covered in the Proteas women's team history.

Mulder, Jansen and where the tradition sits now

The current side has two credible claimants. Marco Jansen is a very tall left-arm quick who bowls a hard length and has made Test runs from the lower middle order, and his claim will stand or fall on whether the batting becomes a first-innings resource rather than an occasional bonus.

Wiaan Mulder's case took an extraordinary turn in July 2025 at Bulawayo, where, captaining South Africa in the absence of the senior players, he made 367 not out against Zimbabwe and then declared. It is the highest score by a South African in Test cricket, the fifth-highest by anyone, and he stopped roughly thirty runs short of Brian Lara's 400 by choice, saying afterwards that the record should stay with a legend. The innings came against a limited attack on a flat pitch and Mulder has been careful not to overclaim for it, but it was also the innings of a batting all-rounder who had spent years being picked mainly for his bowling.

Whether either becomes a Faulkner or a Kallis is not knowable yet. What can be said is that the structural pressure that produced the tradition has weakened: franchise squads are larger than the old provincial ones, specialists are cheaper to carry, and T20 rewards a narrow skill executed perfectly. Careers and figures for the players named here are collected in the player index, the format's own history is in South African Test cricket history, and the rest of the game sits on the cricket in South Africa hub.

Sources and method

The figures on this page come from long-standing published Test and first-class career records, ICC Hall of Fame biographies, and contemporary reports of the matches described — the 1899 Cape Town Test, the 1910-11 tour of Australia, Klusener's debut at Calcutta, and the Bulawayo Test of July 2025. Nottinghamshire's championship titles and Rice's Wisden award are taken from the county's own published history and Wisden's records. Selection judgements — who counts as an all-rounder and who does not — are stated as arguments rather than facts, and no figure on this page is computed from any dataset held on this site.