Ben Stokes joined an elite club of Test all-rounders on Day 2 of the England-West Indies Lord's Test, as he took his 200th wicket in the fomat.
Back to bowling at full tilt after the Lord's Ashes Test last year, Stokes was among the wickets early in the second innings, trapping Kirk McKenzie with the third ball of his first over. It was the 200th wicket for Stokes in his Test career.
The 6000-200 club
Stokes, who also has 6,320 runs to his name in the format, became just the third player in the history of the game to achieve the double of six thousand runs and two hundred wickets, joining two of the greatest all-rounders to have played the game: Jacques Kallis and Sir Garfield Sobers.
In fact, these three all-rounders are so far ahead of the rest of the pack, that even if the cut-off for wickets is reduced to 150, no new names get added to the list. Among the three, Stokes has the lowest batting average (35.3), but the best bowling average (31.6).
With the wicket of McKenzie, Stokes also became the 17th English bowler to get to 200 Test wickets. Among the 16 other English bowlers who have more Test wickets than Stokes, only Sir Ian Botham has scored more than 5,000 runs with the bat, and only him and Andrew Flintoff average more than 30 with the bat.
Among active players with more than 200 wickets in the format, Shakib Al Hasan is the highest run-scorer with 4,505 runs.
The 10,000-300 club
With 100 wickets in ODIs and T20Is combined, Stokes also breached the 300-wicket mark in international cricket across formats. To go with that, he also has 10,368 runs at the time of writing, making him only the sixth all-rounder to the double of 10,000 runs and 300 wickets in international cricket, the other five being: Jacques Kallis, Sanath Jayasuriya, Shakib Al Hasan, Carl Hooper, and Shahid Afridi.
13 English players have scored more than 10,000 runs in international cricket across formats. While it's obvious that Stokes is the leading wicket-taker among them, with 301 wickets at the time of writing, the distance between him and the next person on the list is stark. Joe Root has the second-highest number of wickets among Englishmen with 10,000 or more runs in international cricket - 101.
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