R Ashwin announced his retirement from international cricket after the third Test of India's Australia tour, leaving behind a body of work that the game of cricket had never seen before and might not see again.
Almost every kid that takes up cricket starts with the aspiration of becoming an all-rounder. All-rounders bat well and bowl well. That's essentially as good as you can get at cricket.
Ashwin finished his career with 3,503 runs and 537 wickets in Tests, 707 runs and 156 wickets in ODIs, and 184 runs and 72 wickets in T20Is. Add those numbers up and they amount to 4,394 runs and 765 wickets in international cricket.
Ashwin was (reads odd, doesn't it?) as good as you can get at cricket.
Among those who scored more runs than him, only two picked up more wickets. If hundreds and five-wicket hauls are your currencies of preference, Ashwin scored six centuries and picked 37 five-fors. Only four other cricketers in the history of the game have picked as many five-wicket hauls. None of them scored more than two hundreds. If you find the ICC's in-house ranking system the one true judge of a player's quality, Ashwin remained in the top three of the Test all-rounders' rankings for 70 out of his last 93 Tests.
Also read: Don’t mourn R Ashwin’s retirement: his next innings promises to be even better
And yet, Ashwin's name has largely been used as a footnote in conversations around the game's greatest all-rounders of late. A part of the reason for that has been a gradual decline in his batting output in the last few years. A first-choice No.6 at the peak of his prowess, Ashwin's batting average read 34.92 after 44 Tests by the end of 2016, before falling down to 25.75 by the end of his career. Despite that, he found ways to pull a rabbit out of his hat time and again, rescuing India from precarious situations both home and away. One such effort came as recently as three months back when he scored his sixth Test hundred after an early collapse had left India in a spot of bother against Bangladesh.
With the ball, Ashwin was a genius in the truest sense of the word. The best of bowlers often lose their zing if a part of their action goes minutely out of sync. Ashwin would change his action, run-up, load-up, release, hell, even his entire bowling style from off-spin to leg-spin for fun and excel with almost everything he came up with. He could switch from being statistically the most attacking bowler in Test cricket (no one with more wickets than him has a better strike rate than his 50.7) to being ahead of curve and bowling defensively in T20s (only seven bowlers in the history of all T20 cricket have more wickets than Ashwin's 310 at a better economy rate than his 7.06).
View this post on Instagram
Also read: The emotional Kohli hug that confirmed Ashwin's retirement before it came
Where then, does he actually rank among the greatest all-rounders of the game?
There are multiple ways to look at it.
A basic filtration of raw numbers will throw up the cream of the crop. Only 11 players have done the double of 3,000 runs and 300 wickets in Tests. Among them only seven average more than 25 with the bat and less than 30 with the ball.
Players with 3,000 runs, 300 wickets, 25-plus batting average, & sub-30 bowling average in Tests
| Player | Matches | Runs | Bat Av | 100 | Wkts | Bowl Av | 5-fors | Ave Diff |
| Kapil Dev | 131 | 5248 | 31.05 | 8 | 434 | 29.64 | 23 | 1.4 |
| Shaun Pollock | 108 | 3781 | 32.31 | 2 | 421 | 23.11 | 16 | 9.19 |
| R Ashwin | 106 | 3503 | 25.75 | 6 | 537 | 24 | 37 | 1.75 |
| Ian Botham | 102 | 5200 | 33.54 | 14 | 383 | 28.4 | 27 | 5.14 |
| Imran Khan | 88 | 3807 | 37.69 | 6 | 362 | 22.81 | 23 | 14.88 |
| Richard Hadlee | 86 | 3124 | 27.16 | 2 | 431 | 22.29 | 36 | 4.86 |
| Ravindra Jadeja | 78 | 3312 | 35.61 | 4 | 319 | 24.05 | 15 | 11.55 |
Imran Khan has the highest average difference (higher the better) among them and is widely considered to be one of the best all-rounders ever. Ashwin's long-time partner, Ravindra Jadeja has a double-digit average difference as well and has often been in battle with the off-spinner for the No.1 all-rounder's spot in the ICC rankings over the years.
Ashwin's average difference is the second lowest among the seven after Kapil Dev, but he also has 103 more wickets than the next highest wicket-taker in this list, which also happens to be Kapil.
Now the fact that some of the most storied names in the history of the game like Jacques Kallis, Garry Sobers, and Shakib Al Hasan are not on this list shows that numbers are not the only (or maybe even the right) way to go about it.
Sobers was described by Don Bradman as "five cricketers in one". He could bowl fast, he could bowl slow, he could spin the ball both ways. All while averaging 57.78 with the bat across 93 Tests. As close to achieving completion as you could possibly come. Then there was Kallis. Numbers might just do it for him. 25,534 interntional runs, 577 international wickets - enough said.
Outside the Test game, there's a crop of all-rounders who have had immense success with both bat and ball in limited overs cricket. Shane Watson scored more than 10,000 international runs and took 291 wickets with an average difference of 5.62, a major chunk of it coming in ODIs and T20Is. Lance Klusener was an ODI superstar for South Africa in the late 90s-early 2000s. Shakib has 712 international wickets with more than 14,000 runs and was one of the best all-format all-rounders till the time he was active (which was very recently).
Then there's the class of players who might not necessarily make it to the very top of every numerical list, but have (or had) extremely high ceilings and could singe-handedly turn games around with both bat and ball. Ben Stokes is one of them. Andrew Flintoff used to be of a similar mould too. Irfan Pathan can sneak into this list as well. Yuvraj Singh helped India win two World Cups with his brilliance while having a relatively underwhelming record otherwise. Shahid Afridi could score 37-ball 100s and run through oppositions with his fast leg-breaks.
There's also the crop of players who were so outlandishly successful in one skill that the other got overshadowed. Sachin Tendulkar had 201 wickets to go with his 34,000-plus runs. Sanath Jayasuriya, primarily known for changing the ODI game with his pinch-hitting at the top, had 440 international wickets. Chris Gayle's brutal six-hitting often clouds the fact that he has 260 wickets in his bank as well. Wasim Akram's magic with the ball was accompanied with a more than handy batting pedigree that fetched him more than 6,500 international runs.
The point is, there's no one right way to classify the best all-rounders of all time. Numbers can be wrangled whichever way one likes to come up with prejudiced results. Judging them on the basis of their potential ceiling would also be a very subjective process. Number of different types of skills a player possesses would be a criteria worth accounting for as well, and so would the longevity of the player's excellence.
Also read: R Ashwin's genius of creation translates across fields and levels
Regardless of the approach you pick, Ashwin is bound to appear among the top results. He could sleepwalk his way through a home Test five-for (of which he had 37). He could bat with a bad back for three hours to save a Test in Australia. He could play the role of a pinch-hitter in the IPL, bowl in the powerplay of a T20, hit the most pristine backfoot punches through covers off some of the best fast bowlers in the modern game, and come back and explain why and how he did what he did the next day in multiple languages on his YouTube channel.
That is pretty much as all-round as a cricketer can get.
