Best wicketkeeper or better batsman?

In England’s last Test match, Ben Foakes gave a distillation of wicketkeeping at its best.

In the 152nd over of New Zealand’s second innings at Wellington, Kane Williamson got a sliver of an edge – so fine that the umpire did not notice it, but Foakes snaffled it and convinced Ben Stokes to review the decision.

Seven overs later, Michael Bracewell’s bat was past the crease as he jogged back for a run; Foakes observed that the bat was not grounded and whipped off the bails.

Head coach Brendon McCullum said Foakes even contributed to Daryl Mitchell top-edging a bouncer from Stuart Broad: “He came up to the stumps to impact the game and got a wicket.” So two – or possibly even three– wickets on a docile pitch bore the stamp of Foakes’s creativity, ingenuity and skill.

And yet for Foakes, it still is not enough. He is being replaced in the Test side by Jonny Bairstow, who made six Test centuries as a specialist batsman in 2022 and, England believe, will offer more runs as keeper-batsman at No7.

To pick the better wicketkeeper, or the wicketkeeper-batsman likely to score more runs? It is a new debate, but also a very old one. And it is one infused with a cultural, as well as a cricketing, dimension. To advocate a specialist keeper is not just to make a cricketing argument; it is also, on some level, to make a nostalgic argument for an age when teams really did pick their best keeper. Except, of course, it was rarely quite so simple.

‘If only Ames could keep like Duckworth, or Duckworth could bat like Ames’

In September 1928, England set sail for the Ashes tour of Australia. On board the SS Otranto, George Duckworth told Les Ames: “Only one wicket-keeper can play in each of the Tests, and that means you or me… It is up to the one not selected to help the other in every way.”

When the squad arrived in Australia, PG Fender, the Surrey captain who was covering the tour as a journalist, wrote: “I found everyone regretting that Ames could not keep like Duckworth, or that Duckworth could not bat like Ames, but there was no two opinions, up to that stage, as to the greater ability of Duckworth as a wicketkeeper.”

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Just like 93 years later, the identity of England’s wicketkeeper was a constant discussion in the build-up to the Ashes. And, just like now, there was a certain clarity to the debate: one candidate could be expected to offer more behind the stumps, the other more in front of them.

In Test cricket’s early years, wicketkeeping was the preserve of specialists. ‘Sticky wickets’, when pitches dried out after being left uncovered while it rained, behaved erratically; standing up to spinners in such conditions demanded profound skill, especially with no helmets or even adequate gloves to offer protection. Jack Blackham, Australia’s keeper in the inaugural Test match in 1877, had simple advice for would-be keepers: “Give it up and take on bowling.”

The mental and physical arduousness of keeping wicket, and maintaining concentration ball after ball in an age of high over rates, meant that picking keepers partly for their batting was seen as a risk that could jeopardise their primary skill.

Conventional wisdom had it that sides should pick the best wicketkeeper, and then worry about where they batted. Herbert Strudwick played 28 Tests for England from 1910-26; he averaged 7.9, batting at No11 in more than half of them.

In keeping with these traditions, Duckworth was preferred in all five Ashes Tests in 1928/29. The decision was vindicated by England’s 4-1 series victory; Duckworth contributed 13 catches and one stumping. But, for all his fighting qualities with the bat, Duckworth often batted at 11 for England; he averaged 14.6 in his 24 Tests, batting in last place in nine Tests.

These limitations led to Duckworth’s eventual usurpation as England wicketkeeper. Ames, just as Fender wrote, was universally acclaimed as Duckworth’s inferior behind the stumps. But he opened up new possibilities in front of them.

The summer after the victorious Ashes tour, Ames made his Test debut. He batted at No8, and made a duck. The following winter, Ames made two centuries, from five – doubling the total number of hundreds scored by all Test keepers – during a 1-1 draw in West Indies. It was the prelude to a remarkable Test career: Ames scored eight centuries while keeping, and averaged 40.6. He made runs not just with unprecedented reliability for a keeper, but with speed, stylishly driving over the infield: Ames twice won the Walter Lawrence Trophy, for the fastest century in an English summer.

No one ever lauded Ames as Duckworth’s equal behind the stumps – he allowed four more byes per Test – but he became a reliable keeper and made England a more balanced side.

In 1952, the first edition of the MCC Cricket Coaching Book proclaimed that: “It can therefore be laid down as an absolute principle in team selection that the best wicketkeeper, irrespective of all other considerations, must always be chosen…”

But a generation earlier, England already believed that they were not always best-served by picking their best keeper. The debate about whether they should do so has rarely stopped since.

‘Wicketkeepers are very rarely selected for England unless they can bat’

When Ames played his final Test in 1939, he had scored eight of the 11 centuries by Test keepers. After his retirement, Ames came to look less like a harbinger of what was to come than an extraordinary one-off. In the 1950s, all keepers in Tests averaged just 20.6 – only one run more than in the 1920s.

Godfrey Evans, who played 91 Tests for England from 1946-59, averaged almost exactly this figure: a significant leap from Strudwick and Duckworth, but only half of Ames. In the 1954/55 Ashes, Evans only averaged 17, but made one of the series’ most telling contributions. On the fifth morning at Melbourne, with the series locked at 1-1, Australia needed 165 more runs to win, with eight wickets in hand. Neil Harvey, the great Australian batsman, was at the crease facing Frank Tyson, who bowled as quickly that series as perhaps any England bowler in Test history. Tyson’s tour diary, In The Eye of the Typhoon, takes up the story:

The moment was the start of one of the finest spells in England Test history: six for 16, to give Tyson figures of seven for 27, and ensure a crushing England victory. “He started so many things,” Tyson wrote of Evans. “In the all-important department of wicketkeeping, England had a real matchwinner.” After missing the opening Test with sunstroke, Evans played in the next four; England won the lot, taking the series 4-1. Captain Len Hutton said that “The bowlers have unlimited confidence” in Evans behind the stumps.

Some consider Evans the finest keeper of all time; England once conceded 1,054 runs in the field without him allowing a single bye. He had five principles of wicketkeeping, he wrote in The Gloves are Off: “A good view, balance, concentration, don’t snatch, get your body behind the ball.” Keepers, Evans explained, “deal in fractions of seconds behind the stumps.”

Yet Evans’s hero was revealing: Ames, his fellow Kent keeper. “I admired and wanted to emulate his batting, its unorthodoxy, the unfailing urge to attack, the flow of fours interspersed with the odd six,” Evans wrote. The knowledge that he would not be able to match Ames’s batting returns – he hit seven first-class centuries; Ames hit 102 – spurred Evans on to develop his keeping. “If I was to play for Kent at all, I should have to do something outstanding, spectacular even; so instead of standing back as most wicketkeepers do, I stood right up to everything, fast or slow, and depended on speed and agility and unrelenting concentration to carry me through.”

In the 1950s, Pakistan’s Imtiaz Ahmed and South Africa’s John Waite both averaged just over 30 while keeping – Ahmed was daring with the bat, Waite dour. But when keepers could bat with a panache matching – or even exceeding – Ames, they tended not to remain keepers. West Indies’s Clyde Walcott averaged 40.4 while keeping in his first 15 Tests. Partly because of a troublesome back, Walcott then became a specialist batsman: a decision that was spectacularly vindicated, as he averaged 64.7 without the gloves. For all his brilliance as a keeper-batsman, Walcott ultimately reinforced the belief that leading batsmen should not be burdened by the gloves too.

The moment when a Test wicketkeeper was first manufactured from a non-specialist can be identified. In 1960, Jim Parks was summoned as a replacement for England’s tour to the West Indies. Six years earlier, Parks had played his first Test – as a specialist bat. In 1958, when he was 26, Parks filled in as an emergency keeper for Sussex; he liked the job so much that he persevered, then did it for England too, averaging 32.2 in his 46 Test matches. Parks effectively usurped John Murray, a better keeper who averaged 10 runs fewer in Tests.

In 1965, Alan Knott, fresh from his maiden first-class season, when he had shown his penchant for diving, one-handed catches but averaged only 13.3, toured the Caribbean with an International Cavaliers side. There, West Indies wicketkeeper Jackie Hendricks offered some advice, as Knott recounted: “Wicketkeepers are very rarely selected for England unless they can bat. It was a remark that stuck in my mind and that it has served me well to remember.” Knott represented a new type of Test wicketkeeper – a genuine specialist who also averaged 32.8 with the bat. He needed to be, to play 95 Tests; most considered Bob Taylor to be an even better gloveman, but he averaged just 16.3 in Tests, and had to wait until Knott signed for Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket to enjoy a stint as first choice.

‘I felt so sorry for Jack’

Knott’s batting was an emblem of a wider shift in the Test game, as expectations of what keepers would contribute with the bat ticked up. In the 1990s, keepers in Test cricket averaged 27.3.

For England, the decade was marked by a perennial debate: should Jack Russell or Alec Stewart keep wicket? The pair were born within five months of each other in 1963. Russell was the outstanding English keeper of his generation, particularly adept standing up to medium-fast bowlers, and a doughty batsman. Stewart – like Ames before him – became a fine keeper too. He excelled as a specialist batsman, averaging 46.7, but played 82 of his 133 Tests as keeper-batsman, when he averaged a still very useful 34.9.

In Adelaide in 1991, the Test after making an astounding leg-side stumping standing up to seamer Gladstone Small, Russell was dropped. “If the specialist bowlers and batters had done their job as well as Jack, there would have been no need to hand me the gloves,” Stewart writes in his autobiography. “I felt so sorry for Jack.” It was the start of a trend of Russell continually being sacrificed, with Stewart shunted down from his favoured opening position.

Curiously, one country was largely immune to this trend: Australia. Until 1970, Australian keepers averaged a combined 17.9 in Test cricket, five runs fewer than the average among other Test nations; as late as 1964, wicketkeeper Wally Grout batted at No11 for Australia in a Test. In 1972, his country’s 330th Test, Rod Marsh became the first Australian wicketkeeper to score a Test century. Marsh, Malcolm Knox asserts in The Keepers, was the first Australian stumper who was not also acclaimed as his country’s best gloveman. Never again would Australia tolerate a keeper whose average would be stuck in the teens.

The question mark

“You never know.” So Australia’s Justin Langer greeted Adam Gilchrist when he walked out to bat at Hobart in his second Test in November 1999. Australia were 126 for five, needing 369 to win against an outstanding Pakistan attack that included Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akhtar and Saqlain Mushtaq.

“Those were his first words,” Gilchrist recalls. “I remember thinking: ‘Wow, that’s a positive mindset, but not real sure I’m believing this.'”

The following day, Gilchrist walked off with 149 not out, at almost a-run-a-ball, after leading Australia to a four-wicket win. This has been proclaimed as the moment when expectations of wicketkeepers’ batting were recalibrated forever. In fact, the journey was already well-advanced. Gilchrist both embodied and accelerated the shift.

“I’m very humbled when people say you changed the role of wicketkeeper batsmen, but it wasn’t me,” he says. Gilchrist cites the impact of one-day international cricket – where keepers started to move up the order – as being crucial. His own path to the Australian Test team came through thriving as opener for the ODI side. For this opportunity, Gilchrist had Romesh Kaluwitharana, Sri Lanka’s belligerent keeper-opener when they won the 1996 World Cup, to thank.

Ames and Walcott had illustrated what keepers could achieve with the bat. So did India’s Farokh Engineer, who regularly opened while keeping, South Africa’s Denis Lindsay – who scored three centuries in five Tests against Australia in 1966/67 – and Zimbabwe’s Andy Flower, who averaged an extraordinary 53.7 in 55 Tests as keeper, with 12 hundreds, from 1990-2002. But no one had combined the reliability of Gilchrist’s run-scoring with the pace of it.

In the 2001 Ashes, England’s meticulous head coach Duncan Fletcher had a clipboard with its summaries of how to bowl to Australia’s batsmen. In the final Test of the series against Gilchrist’s name was only a question mark.

The question mark remained there for the bulk of his 96 Tests. Whether Australia were 100 for five or 350 for five, opponents were greeted by Gilchrist’s belligerent approach and imperious range of shots: the square cut, hit with crisp brutality, rivalled his straight drive as the signature. Gilchrist hit 17 Test centuries, seven at more than a run a ball.

After Gilchrist, keeper-batsmen did not just start scoring more; they also started batting more like him. From the 1990s to the 2000s, the strike rates of wicketkeepers rose from 44 to 53. Stewart – who was moved down to Gilchrist’s role at seven in 2001 – Matt Prior, Jos Buttler, Bairstow, Brendon McCullum, MS Dhoni, Rishabh Pant, Sarfaraz Ahmed and Quinton de Kock all played in a manner that emulated Gilchrist. None have quite matched the consistency or speed of his run-making though, Pant – who has five Test centuries at an average of 43.7 and is only 25 – might yet.

In the 1920s, keepers averaged 19 runs fewer than specialist batsmen in the top six. The gap between the averages of specialist bats and keepers fell to eight runs in the 2000s, and then just four runs in the 2010s. So far in the 2020s, keepers are averaging just one run less than specialist batsmen in the top six. When a keeper walks out to bat today, they can now be expected to score virtually as many runs as a specialist batsman.

Keepers in the 2020s both average more, and make them more quickly, than ever before. “He’s done something very bad to the traditional wicketkeeper,” Kumar Sangakkara, a great keeper-batsman who became a specialist batsman, said of Gilchrist. “He’s ruined their careers.”

‘The best keeper is the attacking option’

Many believe that Foakes, outstanding gloveman that he is, is not even England’s most talented keeper of his generation. Instead, it is Michael Bates. “Throughout the England age groups, Batesy was the benchmark in terms of ‘that’s what the best wicketkeeper is doing’,” Buttler has said.

Bates showed his qualities by helping Hampshire to win three limited-overs trophies between 2010 and 2014. In the 40-over final at Lord’s in 2012, he sealed Hampshire’s victory with a brilliant take, standing up to Kabir Ali bowling at 80mph, from the final ball. “It was the best day in my career,” Bates recalls. “Me being up to the stumps brought another dimension to our game and added real value to the team.”

Yet Bates played his last professional match aged 24. The reason was simple: he averaged only 19.9 in first-class cricket, and even less in the white-ball formats. He is now wicketkeeping and fielding coach for England women.

“I was a victim of my quality as a keeper – I was thrust into the first team and played a lot as a fairly young bloke,” he says. “As a result, my batting got exposed.”

Despite his own treatment, Bates is not pessimistic about the quality of keeping in England and beyond. He thinks that, after Gilchrist emerged, there was a radical shift to prioritising batting ability – but that, since his departure from the professional game in 2015, a new equilibrium has been found.

“Ten or 20 years ago I think teams were willing to sacrifice the quality of keeper to potentially get more runs. The situation isn’t as extreme now.”

It was once thought that Twenty20 could rejuvenate keepers; instead, Bates sees teams most inclined to pick better glovemen in first-class matches. While specialist keepers will not return, Bates also believes that the red-ball game has moved away from teams tolerating shoddy glovework.

“I do a lot of keeping coaching throughout the country at different ages. And the conversation would still be, he’s a brilliant keeper. But what’s his batting like? And vice versa. So lads understand from a young age now that if they do want to make it, both their batting and keeping need to be exceptional.”

The partial recorrection that Bates identifies could partly be attributed to the use of data. The average missed chance costs 30 runs; it makes little sense to pick a keeper-batsman averaging a couple of runs more if they drop notably more chances. In 2007, Matt Prior was dropped by England after 10 Tests, with an average of 40.1, because he squandered a series of chances; he then returned, as a much-improved keeper.

Data has also shown that, while the worst keepers are seldom quite as bad as the perception, the best are not quite as good. Even Foakes, terrific keeper that he is, is far from infallible. Yet much of what a keeper does defies easy quantification, like Foakes standing up to 80mph bowling.

When the number of specialist bowers would otherwise be the same, “selecting the best keeper is the attacking option – more wickets equals more wins,” says Nathan Leamon, England’s senior data scientist and author of Hitting Against the Spin. “Picking the batsman-keeper is the defensive choice – more draws.” But Leamon does not have a fixed view on which of these two is better for each side, believing that it depends on the wider context of the team’s strength and balance. And, for this England team then – whether it is Foakes or Bairstow behind the stumps – draws are going the way of the dodo.

The use of data has confirmed one long-observed truth: wicketkeeping is hardest against spin. An analysis by CricViz found that Test keepers missed 25 per cent of chances off off-spinners, but just five per cent off pace bowlers. And so, when spin dominates, there is logic to prioritising a keeper’s glovework over their batting.

This thinking underpinned India’s decision to use Wriddhiman Saha as their first-choice wicketkeeper in Asia, and Pant as their first-choice keeper elsewhere, from 2018-21. In Asia, India preferred Saha’s dexterous keeping, especially standing up to the stumps; he still averaged a perfectly respectable 29.4 with the bat; like Foakes, the specialist keepers of today average several times more with the bat than the specialists of a century ago. Outside Asia, India preferred Pant’s extra runs; there, his lesser pedigree as a keeper was less significant.

So even after Foakes’s Ashes omission, he could well return to England’s side for their next Test engagement: the five-Test tour of India in early 2024. As keeper-batsmen, the relative merits of Bairstow are greater in England; the relative merits of Foakes are greater when spin dominates.

The debate about Bairstow or Foakes, then – two outstanding, but very different, keeper-batsmen – is both a new one and a very old one. Just as Fender said of Ames and Duckworth, England would doubtless like Bairstow to be able to keep like Foakes and Foakes to be able to bat like Bairstow. Failing that, cricket’s eternal debate will rumble on.