Jacques Kallis
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 Jacques Kallis at #7 and Kumar Sangakkara at #11.
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The case for Jacques Kallis
Jacques Kallis was the most complete all-rounder of the modern era and, statistically, one of the greatest cricketers ever. He scored 13,289 Test runs at 55.37 with 45 centuries, figures that alone would rank him among the finest batsmen, and took 292 Test wickets with genuine fast-medium pace, plus over 200 catches at slip. Across formats he passed 25,000 international runs and 500 wickets, a double no one else has achieved at that level. Kallis batted with granite orthodoxy for South Africa, often anchoring the order, while his bowling gave his captain a genuine extra seam option. Undemonstrative and sometimes overlooked beside flashier contemporaries, he compiled a body of work whose sheer breadth, elite batting and Test-class bowling sustained for two decades, is arguably unmatched in the game's history.
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.