South Africa
1999-06-17
At the 1999 World Cup, Lance Klusener became one of cricket's great individual stories — 281 runs at an average of 140.50 and a strike rate of 122, plus 17 wickets at 20.58. He won four Player of the Match awards in nine matches. Yet South Africa exited at the semi-final stage in the famous Edgbaston tied semi.
England vs West Indies
1966-07-01
Garry Sobers's 1966 England tour was the greatest all-round series by any player in Test history up to that date. He scored 722 runs at 103.14 — including a double century at Headingley — and took 20 wickets with his three different bowling styles. West Indies won 3-1 and Sobers was on another level. One England selector described it as watching a man play a different sport from everyone else.
England vs India
1952-06-24
In the second Test of India's miserable 1952 tour of England, Vinoo Mankad almost single-handedly turned the match into a contest. After being recalled from Lancashire League cricket at the last moment, he scored 72 and 184, bowled 73 overs of left-arm spin in England's first innings to take 5 for 196, and still finished on the losing side. The Lord's Test became known forever as 'Mankad's Match'.
India v Australia
1948-02-06
Vinoo Mankad's first overseas tour was a masterclass of all-round cricket. On the 1947-48 tour of Australia he scored 583 Test runs at 44.84 (centuries in the third and fifth Tests at Melbourne, 116 and 111), took 17 Test wickets with his slow left-arm, ran out Bill Brown twice for backing up too far at the non-striker's end — coining the now-famous term 'Mankading' — and finished with over 1,400 first-class runs and 50 wickets across the trip.
Nelson Cricket Club v Lancashire League sides
1929-04-27
From 1929 to 1937 Learie Constantine was the professional at Nelson Cricket Club in the Lancashire League, a contract that paid him substantially more than Test cricket and quietly turned him into the most famous Caribbean man in Britain. He took 793 league wickets at 9.90 and scored 4,397 runs at 37, won Nelson seven titles in eight years, and shifted the social geography of black professionalism in pre-war England. His decade in Nelson was as influential as anything he did in Test whites.
Kent and England
1925-08-31
In 1925 the 38-year-old Frank Woolley scored 3,069 first-class runs and took 110 wickets — one of the great all-round seasons in English county cricket and the formal peak of a career that would finish with 58,969 runs and 2,068 wickets, both still among the top five in cricket history.
England
1914-07-01
Frank Woolley emerged in the years 1910-1914 as the most beautiful left-handed batsman in cricket — Kent's all-round star, England's middle-order hope and, after the war, one of only nine men to score over 50,000 first-class runs.
South Africa, Australia
1910-12-15
George Aubrey Faulkner of Transvaal was — by Wisden's 1910 reckoning — 'the best all-rounder in the world'. He averaged 60.55 in the 1909-10 series at home v England, then made 732 runs at 73.20 (including 204) on the 1910-11 tour of Australia, where South Africa lost the series 4-1. A googly bowler and middle-order batsman, his career spanned 1906 to 1924.
Australia, England
1909-08-31
Montague 'Monty' Noble played 42 Tests for Australia between 1898 and 1909, captaining 15 of them and winning eight. A medium-paced bowler whose 'spin-swerve' (an early form of off-cutting in-swinger) and a top-order batsman, he scored 1,997 Test runs at 30.25 and took 121 Test wickets at 25. He led Australia to the Ashes win at home in 1907-08 and the away win in 1909.
Warwickshire
1909-07-01
Frank Foster, the left-arm fast-medium bowler and middle-order batter from Birmingham, made his Warwickshire first-class debut in 1908. By the close of 1909 he was establishing himself as one of the most promising young all-rounders in England — the foundation for the career that would, two years later, deliver Warwickshire its first county championship and, on the 1911-12 Ashes tour, the new-ball partnership with S.F. Barnes that won the Ashes.
Yorkshire, England
1906-08-30
In 1906 Yorkshire's George Hirst scored 2,385 first-class runs at 45.86 and took 208 wickets at 16.50 — a 'double-double' (2,000 runs and 200 wickets) that no cricketer before or since has achieved in a single season. Wisden called it 'a feat unique in the history of the game' and it remains so 120 years on.
Australia, England
1905-08-31
Warwick Armstrong, Australia's 26-year-old all-rounder, scored 2,002 runs and took 130 wickets in first-class matches on the 1905 tour of England — one of the great all-rounder tour returns of all time. The 'Big Ship' was Joe Darling's most consistent player; he would go on to play 50 Tests and captain Australia to a 5-0 Ashes whitewash in 1920-21.
Middlesex CCC
1899-09-15
In the 1899 first-class season Albert Trott scored 1,175 runs and took 239 wickets for Middlesex and the various invitational sides he played for. He became, and remains, the only cricketer to do a 1,000-run / 200-wicket double in a single first-class season — a feat he would repeat in 1900. The same summer he hit the only six ever to clear the Lord's pavilion. Wisden made him a Cricketer of the Year in 1899.
Australia v England
1898-01-01
On 1 January 1898 at the MCG, Montague Alfred Noble — a 24-year-old New South Wales medium-pacer and middle-order batsman — made his Test debut against Stoddart's England. He took 6 for 49 in England's second innings as Australia won by an innings and 55 runs. It was the start of a 42-Test career, fifteen as captain, that would produce 121 Test wickets at 25.00 and a reputation as Australia's most complete all-rounder before Keith Miller.
Australia v England
1895-03-06
Across the five Tests of the 1894-95 Ashes, George Giffen — Australia's captain, opening bowler and number-three batsman — scored 475 runs at 52.78 and took 34 wickets at 24.12. The combined haul is still, 130 years later, the best all-round performance in any Test series in cricket history. Australia lost the rubber 2-3, but Giffen's series average has never been matched.
Australia v England
1895-01-11
On Test debut at Adelaide in January 1895, the 21-year-old Victorian all-rounder Albert Trott — playing alongside his older brother and captain Harry — batted at number ten for 38 not out and 72 not out (an unbeaten 110 in the match) and took 8 for 43 in England's second innings. Australia won by 382 runs. It was statistically the most complete Test debut in cricket history; within four years Trott would, for separate reasons, never play Test cricket for Australia again.
Oxford University, Sussex
1894-05-21
Charles Burgess Fry was 22 in 1894, an Oxford undergraduate who had broken the British long-jump record (23 feet 5 inches in 1892) and equalled the world record (23 feet 6½ inches on 4 March 1893). He was elected Oxford cricket captain for 1894 and made his first-class Sussex debut the same summer, beginning a partnership with Ranjitsinhji that would dominate English batting for fifteen years and produce a man often cited as the greatest all-round Englishman of his era.
Lancashire / England
1888-08-31
Johnny Briggs of Lancashire was the most engaging all-round cricketer of the 1880s — a popular fielder, a left-arm slow bowler who could turn the ball sharply, and a hard-hitting middle-order batsman with one Test century to his name (121 at Melbourne in 1885). He became the first bowler in Test cricket to take 100 wickets, in February 1895, and finished his career with 118 wickets at 17.75. He suffered an epileptic seizure during the Headingley Test of 1899, returned to play one further season, and died in Cheadle Royal Asylum in January 1902 aged 39.
Surrey / England
1885-08-31
George Alfred Lohmann was the Surrey amateur-turned-professional who became, by 1888, the deadliest English bowler of his generation. He played his first county match in 1884, took 142 first-class wickets and 571 runs in 1885, and made his Test debut in 1886. He went on to take Test wickets at 10.75 — the lowest career average of any Test bowler in history with 50+ wickets — and to record a strike rate (34.1) that no one has ever bettered. By the end of the 1880s he was as central to England's bowling attack as Spofforth had been to Australia's.
Multiple
1869-09-01
In 1869, his fifth full season of first-class cricket and the year he turned 21, W.G. Grace produced batting figures that ended any debate about the leading cricketer in England. He scored 1,320 first-class runs at an average of 57.3 — at a time when totals over 200 were rare and averages over 40 were almost unknown — and turned the Gentlemen vs Players fixture, which the Players had usually dominated, into a one-man Gentlemen victory.
Aboriginal Australian XI vs English club and county sides
1868-09-01
Johnny Mullagh — born Unaarrimin around 1841 on Mullagh station near Harrow, Victoria — was the outstanding all-rounder of the 1868 Aboriginal tour of England. In 47 matches he scored 1,698 runs at around 23 and took 245 wickets at 10, bowling round-arm in a free, wristy style and frequently keeping wicket between deliveries. The English fast bowler George Tarrant, after bowling at Mullagh in a tour interval, declared he had never bowled to a better batsman.
Gloucestershire and All-England representative sides
1862-06-01
Edward Mills Grace — E.M. — the elder of the famous Grace cricketing brothers, was in the early 1860s the most talked-about young batsman in England, predating his younger brother W.G.'s dominance by several years. A Gloucestershire man who worked as a country coroner, E.M. Grace combined an astonishing eye with an unorthodox but devastatingly effective style, and his all-round performances in the late 1850s and early 1860s marked him as a coming great before W.G. had played his first first-class match.
MCC vs Kent
1862-08-15
Three years before his younger brother W.G. made his first-class debut, E.M. Grace produced one of the most extraordinary all-round performances in cricket history. Playing for the MCC at Canterbury Week against Kent on 14-15 August 1862, the 20-year-old from Downend carried his bat for 192 not out of an MCC total of 344, then took all ten Kent wickets in the first innings for 69 runs. The match, played 12-a-side, would not enter the official records — but the news of it travelled around the cricket world and made E.M. Grace a household name overnight.
Surrey and All-England elevens
1859-08-01
Heathfield Harman Stephenson, a surgeon's son from Esher, made his Surrey debut in 1853 and through the second half of the 1850s established himself as one of the leading professional all-rounders in the country — a fast-roundarm bowler, occasional wicket-keeper and capable middle-order batsman. He toured North America with Parr in 1859 and would, two years later, captain the first English tour of Australia.
Surrey and United All-England Eleven
1858-08-15
By the late 1850s the Reigate-born William Caffyn had emerged as the leading all-rounder in the strongest county side in England, scoring runs in the middle order for Surrey and bowling effective right-arm medium-fast roundarm. Caffyn was on the 1859 North America tour, both 1860s Australian tours, and after emigrating in 1864 became the foundational professional coach of Australian cricket.
Sussex; Players
1834-07-12
James Dean (later distinguished as 'Senior' after his son entered the game) emerged in the mid-1830s as one of Sussex's most reliable all-rounders — a slow roundarm bowler and steady lower-middle-order batter. Born at Duncton in 1816, Dean would go on to become a founder of the All-England Eleven in 1846, but his career began in the 1830s as a teenaged Sussex professional.
Sussex
1825-06-01
Jem Broadbridge of Duncton, three years younger than Lillywhite and his partner at the other end, was the second of Sussex's twin roundarm spearheads of the 1820s. A right-arm fast-medium bowler and hard-hitting batsman, he was according to Haygarth 'for some seasons the best general cricketer in England, both as batsman, bowler and single wicket player'. He walked the 60-mile round trip from Duncton to Brighton to play for Sussex.