One-hundred-and-twenty-two Tests, 7273 runs, 252 wickets. Ben Stokes put together a mighty impressive body of work in his 13-year career. Only five England cricketers played more Tests, 10 scored more runs, and eight took more wickets in their Test career. Add 44 Tests as captain - the seventh highest for England - and the career gains further heft. Then there are the ODI numbers - 3463 runs, 74 wickets, and a Player-of-the-Match performance in a World Cup final. With Stokes, the hype and his larger-than-life persona sometimes overshadowed the numbers, but the stats themselves point to an incredible career.
In an era of diminishing allrounders, Stokes showcased outstanding skills with both bat and ball. Apart from him, only three others have achieved the double of 5000 runs and 250 wickets in Tests - Jacques Kallis, Ian Botham and Kapil Dev. That's a pretty impressive club to be a part of.
All-round brilliance after a slow start
In his first 20 Tests, Stokes' numbers were quite ordinary - a batting average under 30 and a bowling average in excess of 40. Then came the transformation. Over the next five years, the averages flipped: the batting average exceeded 40 and the bowling one slipped to under 28. Eight of his 14 Test hundreds, and seven of the 16 four-wicket hauls, came in this 47-Test period.
Since 2021, the stats have dipped, especially with the bat. In 55 Tests he has scored only four hundreds, with the average dropping to 30.26, which is almost identical to his bowling average. In this period, he especially struggled away from home: his batting average dropped to 25.16 - from 41.79 in the previous period - while the bowling average went up to 36.34. He remained a huge force in home conditions, averaging 39.26 and 25.58 with bat and ball, but the huge fall in overseas numbers meant the all-round stats were no longer in the elite category.
Peak Stokes
The career progression clearly illustrates Stokes' best phase - from 2016 to 2020 when, over 47 Tests, the difference between his batting and bowling averages was 14.75. If we round it off to 50 Tests, let's look at how Stokes' peak compares with the best 50-Test streaks for other allrounders.
Among players who scored at least 1500 runs and took 100 or more wickets in these 50 Tests, eight allrounders have a higher difference between their batting and bowling averages in their best 50-Test streak than Stokes, for whom the difference was 13.53.
The best among them are Garry Sobers and Jacques Kallis. Both were clearly more adept with bat than ball, which is reflected in batting averages of over 70 in their best 50-Test phase. Their bowling averages were over 32, but that was still enough for a difference of around 40. Perhaps even more remarkable, in terms of true all-round skill, was Imran Khan, who averaged over 50 with bat and under 20 with ball in a nearly-10-year-period from March 1982 to December 1991. The batting average was admittedly boosted by 18 not-outs, but it's still extremely impressive that he scored five centuries and took 15 five-fors in this period. They were the three allrounders whose difference in averages exceeded 30, while the next best was under 20.
For those interested in the Botham versus Stokes debate, Botham shades this one. In his best 50 Tests, between August 1977 and July 1982, Botham's batting average was slightly lower than Stokes', but he more than made up with the ball, averaging under 23 for his 226 wickets, exactly twice as many as Stokes took in his best 50.
The difference in the wickets tally also illustrates the key difference between the two: at his peak, Botham was a frontline bowler for England, opening the attack 41 times in 85 innings during this period (he was the first-change bowler a further 31 times). Stokes, on the other hand, came on as the third or fourth-change bowler in 40 out of 79 innings in these 50 Tests. The scatterplot shows the percentage of their teams' runs and wickets contributed by these 10 players in their best 50 Tests: Botham took more than 30% of England's wickets (excluding run-outs) in this period; for Stokes, the number was under 14%. In fact, Botham's wicket contribution was next only to Hadlee's, among these 10 allrounders. With the bat, Stokes' contribution was ahead, but only marginally.
Where Stokes does sneak ahead of Botham is in the longest stretch of matches with a batting average of over 40 and a bowling average of under 30. From the Boxing Day Test of 2015 till March 4, 2021, Stokes played 52 Tests in which he averaged 40.21 with the bat, and 27.92 with the ball. Botham's best was 48 Tests, while Andrew Flintoff's was 42. Only three players have had a longer streak than Stokes' 52: Ravindra Jadeja leads the list with an incredible 82-Test run between February 2014 and November 2025, when he averaged 40.1 with bat and 25.55 with ball. Imran (81 matches) and Kallis (76) are the only others with longer streaks than Stokes'.
Long spells, and a partnership breaker
Two-hundred-and-fifty-two wickets in 122 Tests - or 113 wickets in his best 50-Test streak - does not begin to tell the importance of Stokes the bowler. With James Anderson and Stuart Broad around, and several others to support them, Stokes' bowling skills were often not required when conditions were favourable for seamers. However, when conditions were more difficult, and when the opposition batters were putting together partnerships, Stokes' ability to bowl long spells and break partnerships was invaluable.
The most telling stat in this regard is the number of partnership-breaking wickets he took: of his tally of 252 wickets, 70 ended partnerships of 50 or more runs. The percentage of 27.78 is the highest among all pacers with 100 or more career wickets. Among all bowlers who have taken 200 or more wickets, only Danish Kaneria of Pakistan has a higher percentage of partnership-breaking wickets - 74 out of 261 (28.35%).
Through these passages when the opposition batters had bedded in, what stood out about Stokes was his relentlessness, energy, and his refusal to give up, as he steamed in ball after ball with new plans to get the breakthrough. Out of the 518 different spells he bowled in his career, 60 consisted of at least eight overs. The percentage of 11.58 is the second-highest among all pacers who've bowled at least 100 spells since his Test debut. The only bowler with a higher percentage is New Zealand's Neil Wagner, who, quite incredibly, bowled 71 such spells out of 364. In fact, it's a list dominated by New Zealand bowlers, with Trent Boult, Matt Henry and Colin de Grandhomme all making the top five.
Here's further proof that Stokes generally took his wickets when others struggled to: in the 16 innings in which he took four or more wickets, he had a strike rate of 25 balls per wicket, while the other bowlers in those innings achieved a strike rate of only 90.45. The ratio of 3.62 is the second-best among 122 bowlers who've taken at least 15 four-wicket hauls. Only Fidel Edwards, with 3.93, had a higher ratio.
Against the Big Two
Of the 122 Tests Stokes played, 54 (44.3%) were against the two other teams that constitute the Big Three, Australia and India. Undeniably, he had his moments against them - most notably at Headingley in 2019 and Lord's in 2025, but also in Perth in 2013 and 2025, and Old Trafford in 2025. However, the overall numbers against the two best teams of his era are slightly underwhelming, especially while playing away from home.
In 26 home Tests against them, Stokes had strong numbers with both bat and ball, with a batting average of over 35 and a bowling average of 30. Away from home, though, the batting stats slipped significantly - he averaged under 25 in 14 Tests in Australia - while the bowling average climbed to 35. Only four of his 12 Player-of-the-Match awards came against these teams, and they were all at home, which further underscores below-par performances against these two teams on their home turf.
Stokes the captain
Over a 44-Test stint as captain, Stokes scored 2301 runs and took 84 wickets, putting him in an elite club of three players who scored 2000-plus runs and took 75-plus wickets when leading the team. Apart from Stokes, only Imran Khan and Garry Sobers have achieved this.
In terms of team results, the output was mixed. Only two England captains have won more Tests than Stokes' 24 - Joe Root (27) and Michael Vaughan (26). England also lost 18 of the 44 Tests that Stokes captained, which means the win-loss ratio for Stokes as captain was a middling 1.33; in fact, among the 15 captains who have led England in 25 or more Tests, Stokes' win-loss ratio as captain is exactly in the middle, in eighth place. Against Australia and India, Stokes' England only managed a 7-11 win-loss record (3-6 versus Australia, 4-5 versus India, and 2-8 against them away from home). Against all other teams, he won more Tests than he lost.
The middling record is reflected in England's stats in the WTC cycles. In the 40 Tests he captained which were a part of the WTC, Stokes had a 21-17 win-loss record. His best phase was the 2021-23 cycle - he came in midway through that championship and achieved a fantastic 9-1 record, including a 3-0 rout in Pakistan. However, he still couldn't take England to the final, thanks to the 1-7 record he inherited in that cycle. In the next two cycles, England lost more Tests than they won under Stokes - 8-9 in the 2023-25 cycle, and 4-6 in the current one.
The captaincy record that stands out for Stokes isn't the one about the W; it's the lack of the D. The draw was a result that drew scorn from Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum, and that's reflected in the fact that only two out of Stokes' 44 Tests in charge ended in a stalemate. The percentage of 4.5 is the lowest among 66 captains who have led at least 25 times in Tests. That's obviously a reflection of the times too, but it's a fitting stat to remember Stokes' captaincy by.