Don Bradman
Kumar Sangakkara
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Don Bradman at #1 and Kumar Sangakkara at #11.
Head-to-head FAQ
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The case for Don Bradman
Donald Bradman's career Test average of 99.94 is the most celebrated number in cricket, and arguably in all of sport. In 52 Tests he scored 6,996 runs with 29 centuries, twelve of them double hundreds, and once made 334 against England at Leeds. He needed only four runs in his final innings, at The Oval in 1948, to average 100, but was bowled for a duck by Eric Hollies, a full stop of almost mythic cruelty. Bradman scored his runs on uncovered pitches, against Bodyline devised specifically to stop him, and averaged nearly double the next-best batsman of any era. He also captained Australia's unbeaten 1948 Invincibles. No batsman since has come close to his standard; the gap between Bradman and the field is the widest in the sport's statistical history, which is why he sits first on almost every credible list.
The case for Kumar Sangakkara
Kumar Sangakkara was one of the most prolific and elegant batsmen of his era and a fine wicketkeeper for much of his career. The Sri Lankan left-hander scored 12,400 Test runs at 57.40 with 38 centuries, eleven of them over 150, and 14,234 ODI runs, the second-highest ODI tally ever. In the 2015 World Cup he became the only man to score four consecutive ODI hundreds. Sangakkara combined classical technique with a voracious appetite for big scores, and his double and triple hundreds anchored Sri Lanka's batting alongside Mahela Jayawardene, with whom he shared a record 624-run Test partnership in 2006. Articulate and cerebral off the field, he was equally commanding at the crease. Whether keeping wicket or purely batting, his run-scoring consistency across formats places him firmly among the greatest batsmen of the modern game.