Two for the Price of One: Fave All-rounders

Unearthing a genuine all-rounder is akin to finding the holy grail. I’m not talking about someone who can merely bat and bowl a bit, smash a quick thirty and strangle the middle-overs scoring rate in an ODI. Nor am I concerned with Twenty20 where anyone who can slog to ‘cow corner’ and deliver a ‘dot ball’ is hailed as an all-rounder. No, I’m referring to those rare treasures capable of holding down a place in a first-class cricket Eleven as both a batsman and bowler.

That is a mighty tough criterion to satisfy. In England, Ian Botham is often held up as a world-class all-rounder. Statistically that may be true but, in the second half of his career, he was little more than a medium-pacer living off the glories of the 1978-81 era. Although he played several years for Somerset, ‘Beefy’ was never a favourite of mine. To be honest, neither were any of those subsequently touted, however briefly and with fingers firmly crossed, as ‘The New Botham’. David Capel, Chris Lewis, Dominic Cork, Ronnie Irani, Adam Hollioake, Craig White, Mark Alleyne and now the Curran brothers were, or are, fine county players. Some, like Paul Collingwood, enjoyed lengthy international careers but I’d hardly describe him as a Test cricket all-rounder.

In the modern game of short boundaries and long hitting, Ben Stokes is the nearest we have come to that elusive target. The problem is that not only can he strike a double-century, bowl at 90mph and pull off miraculous catches but also packs a mean punch on a boozy night out. His face seems frozen into a perma-sneer. It doesn’t endear him to me one jot. So who have been the all-rounders to win me over?

Thirty years before Jacques Kallis blew previous Test all-rounder records out of the water, I was transfixed by Garry Sobers. I only really saw him play in his late thirties, whether in the Sunday League for Nottinghamshire or for the West Indies on tour here in 1973, but he was always worth watching. His left-arm pace bowling action was surprisingly ugly and yet he wielded the blade with languid ease. His 8,032 Test run aggregate lasted throughout my teenage years before Geoff Boycott surpassed it, and I wish I could have seen him in his prime.

I’ve already raved about Mike Procter who, while prevented by South Africa’s isolation, graced the county game with Gloucestershire. During the Seventies he produced some superb innings and could bowl both at high speed – off the wrong foot - and off-spin. At the start of that decade an Oxford undergraduate began to make a name in the English game and went on to become the finest all-rounder of his generation. Imran Khan wasn’t your typical cricketer, and his playboy proclivities didn’t chime with my idea of a sporting idol. Nevertheless, he scored thirty first-class centuries and was a superb swing and seam bowler whose near 1,800 career wickets were achieved at under 23 apiece. His action was a dream and so was the way he capped a 22-year spell with Pakistan by winning the 1992 World Cup.

Imran’s protégé Wasim Akram’s bowling action was very different. It seemed innocuous at the point of release but then the batsman often didn’t know what hit him, either metaphorically or physically.  I also enjoyed watching him bat but it was as a limited-overs bowler that he excelled. No other paceman has more than his 502 ODI victims.

However, I actually preferred another Pakistan stalwart from the Seventies, Asif Iqbal. He neither ripped up the record books, bowled at fearsome pace nor blazed brutally with the bat, but it was the calm elegance he exuded which appealed to me. I saw little of him representing Pakistan but he achieved a lot of success with Kent in their heyday and was one of the most recognisable players on the circuit.

There have been many other high-quality all-rounders, of course. Kapil Dev was one of the very best in the Eighties, while in more recent times there have been Shane Watson, Shahid Afridi, Ravi Jadeja and Bangladesh’s one-man band Shakib al-Hasan, the latter three being members of the slow bowling fraternity. I used to like Moeen Ali. when he was just a stylish left-hander, but his forced conversion into frontline spinner has sadly somewhat diminished his batting and consequently his all-round credentials.

Other multi-talented home cricketers have caught my eye over the years. The big-bellied boozers Ians Blackwell and Austin copied the ‘beefy’ physique of Botham but without quite emulating his feats on the pitch. I also recall hearing the Chelmsford chants of “Ronnie Irani’s Barmy Army” greeting the popular Essex man in the Nineties. Personally I wasn’t a fan of his, but have to admit his charisma earned him considerable rapport with spectators, even the good-humoured Aussies.

Two decades earlier, Stuart Turner was another Essex stalwart but his near-14,000 runs and 1,300 wickets were not considered sufficient to warrant international recognition. Trevor Jesty was even more unfortunate not to win an England Test cap given his superior batsmanship. I mainly remember him representing his native Hampshire but continued to score runs for Surrey and Lancashire into his forties.

Someone who is still producing eye-catching performances in his fifth decade is Darren Stevens. I’ve only really admired him in the past half a dozen years when he has defied the ageing process by consistently clubbing runs in all formats for Kent, allied to nagging medium-paced seam and swing which in 2017 netted 62 Championship wickets at 18 apiece. I bumped into him at Membury Services a few summers ago,. At first I didn’t recognise the unremarkable figure in natty leather cap, tweed jacket and greying stubble, resembling a trusty gamekeeper rather than a brilliant county cricketer. He’d never fit in with the England set-up but what a player!

Chris Woakes has at least more than a hundred international appearances to his name but his batting and bowling record for Warwickshire indicates that he should have many, many more. His Test averages are on a par with Andrew Flintoff’s, yet he remains woefully under-rated. He’s nudging thirty but continues to look a lanky twelve so with luck and lack of injury he may yet regain a regular spot. I hope so.

I couldn’t review my list of fave all-rounders without revisiting Somerset and selecting Peter Trego. Since returning to the West Country, this son of Weston-Super-Mare has become a cult hero. His whizz-bang batting has won many a match in all three formats while even in his mid-thirties was carrying an injury-plagued attack in the Championship. He even blazed a trail by sporting an ugly ‘sleeve’ tattoo before it became fashionable. At 37, he still earns a crust around the world but, even with white ball only, hopefully there’ll be further prolific summers at Taunton, too.