“I struggled after getting seven wickets on my Test debut against West Indies, with the press building me up as the next Ian Botham. I went to play a game for Derbyshire in Cambridgeshire the next day and I had to leave the field!”
This was Dominic Cork talking about his Test debut in 1995 and the extraordinary pressures of being hailed as the “next Ian Botham”, an albatross that hung so heavily around the necks of so many cricketers once Botham departed international cricket. Think David Capel, Craig White, Derek Pringle, Ronnie Irani, Phil DeFreitas, Chris Lewis, Cork, Darren Gough, Adam Hollioake and Alex Tudor, and probably a few more, and think of ridiculously unfair burdens, simply because England had never produced a cricketer remotely like Botham until he arrived on the Test scene in 1977.
Cork was an excellent swing bowler who took 131 Test wickets at 29.81, but his batting average was just 18. The hunt for all-round greatness was only called off once Andrew Flintoff announced himself some years later, and, lo and behold, then Ben Stokes followed him fairly swiftly in successfully dealing with the most exacting physical and mental demands that cricket can offer. That’s three genuine England all-rounders in nearly fifty years. But you can be certain, once Stokes is gone, the search for the “next Ben Stokes” will begin in earnest.
It’s the rarity, you see, and that’s not just in England. Take a look at the ICC Test all-rounder rankings and it shows India’s Ravindra Jadeja at the top, followed by South Africa’s Marco Jansen, Bangladesh’s Mehidy Hasan and Shakib Al Hasan, Australia’s Pat Cummins, West Indies’ Jason Holder and the England quartet of Joe Root, Gus Atkinson, Stokes and Chris Woakes.
There are some very different interpretations of an all-rounder there and it invites the question of the exact definition of the role. One suggestion has always been that the player’s batting average must exceed their bowling average (Jadeja certainly does that, with 34.74 against 24.14), while another is that they must be able to hold down a place as a specialist batsman or bowler, should one part of their game be incapacitated, as has been the case with Stokes in recent times.
It also points to the different types of all-rounders — batting all-rounders who bowl seam or spin, and bowling all-rounders who bowl either seam or spin. And then there was, of course, the incomparable Sir Garfield Sobers, who could bowl left-arm swingers and both finger and wrist spin. I think we can safely say he is the greatest all-rounder the game has seen, followed by South Africa’s Jacques Kallis. As for England’s greatest, I find it hard to look past Botham.
But are we too obsessed with this role, given the scarcity of suitable candidates? This was India’s Sanjay Manjrekar some years ago: “England’s problem seems to be that they go looking for all-rounders to fit into their team and end up picking players who can do both jobs reasonably well. Big mistake!
“ ‘Reasonably well’ is just not good enough in Tests. One must set off looking only for top-class batsmen and exceptional bowlers, and if one of these batsmen or bowlers goes on to add another string to his bow, that’s great: you have your accidental all-rounder.”
The last point is confirmed by the fact that Botham, Kapil Dev, Imran Khan and Richard Hadlee all batted at No8 in their first Tests. Sobers batted at nine. They were all bowlers first.
This is a cautionary tale against “bits-and-pieces” cricketers when the time comes to cast a net around in search of Stokes’s Test replacement. The most successful all-rounder in the County Championship in the past two seasons? Hampshire’s Liam Dawson, who, before this season, averaged 48.54 with the bat and 22.69 with his left-arm spinners. I suspect England’s selectors will return to Dawson for the white-ball games this summer, but as for Test cricket, at 35 he is older than Stokes.
Indeed, when you look at the list of best all-round county performers in those past two years it is their age that is most striking. So many are older than 30.
If England want a batsman who can bowl left-arm spin, then they need look no further than Jacob Bethell, and there are a number of potential batsmen/spinners around in the likes of Leicestershire’s Rehan Ahmed, his brother Farhan at Nottinghamshire, Somerset’s Archie Vaughan, Surrey’s Will Jacks and Sussex’s James Coles.
There are a number of seam-bowling all-rounders too in Atkinson, Woakes, Brydon Carse and the Overton brothers, Craig and Jamie (Somerset and Surrey), but further down the line there are players being monitored: the likes of Tom Lawes (Surrey), Harry Moore (Derbyshire), Sebastian Morgan (Middlesex) and Jack Home (Worcestershire).
Even younger names to keep an eye on, as England are, are Caleb Falconer (Middlesex), Noah Thain (Essex) and Byron Hatton-Lowe (Nottinghamshire), but the truth is that, at the moment, there is only one viable replacement for Stokes in the Test side — Sam Curran, who played the last of his 24 Tests in 2021. And even for him his highest batting position was at No7 in three of those Tests and his numbers are the wrong way round at 24.69 (batting) and 35.51 (bowling).
Curran was Ed Smith’s “swarm harmoniser” (“someone who improves the collective output of everything around him”) when national selector, as Smith attempted to buck the traditional Test-match template of five batsmen, an all-rounder at six and four bowlers, by at times picking six bowlers to maximise the resources available.
Smith was trying to assuage the lack of top-order batsmen by dipping into the pool of batsmen/wicketkeepers and all-rounders, signposting a worrying direction of travel of modern cricket under the control of T20. Specialists are becoming rarer, as are genuine all-rounders, simply by dint of the variety of skills and training (both cricketing and physical) required for the different formats, as well as the overbearing volume of cricket.
It seems that the gold dust all-rounder who balances a side perfectly, bats in the top six and can be a fourth fast bowler is only going to be harder to find. Australia’s Cameron Green, whose figures just about pass the test of 36.23 with bat and 35.31 with the ball, is such a player, but he has not played a Test since March last year because of injury.
County pitches often encourage medium-pace all-rounders, like the retired Darren Stevens or Ryan Higgins, who is still doing his stuff for Middlesex, but lower down the chain do we really encourage genuine all-rounders? In the interest of fairness at younger levels, too often we penalise the all-rounder by allowing them to excel in only one of their disciplines. This happens even at representative levels. Is that right? Of course it is not.
I asked a number of well-respected and well-informed observers of the English game about who could replace Stokes one day and only one name cropped up: Flintoff. The 17-year-old Rocky, that is, not the 19-year-old Corey, who has just signed for Kent. For Lancashire and England Lions we have only seen Rocky’s batting so far because of injury — he could not play at all last week because of a “lumbar stress reaction” — but his dad did not do much bowling in his teenage years either and those who know say Rocky can be just as exciting with the ball. No pressure, Rocky, but hopefully see you in the Test arena in about five years’ time.
