100: Trevor Gard
The bearded wonder behind the stumps for Somerset for much of the Eighties. Gard was one of a dying breed, a ‘keeper who couldn’t bat but was worth his place for his ability as a tidy, athletic man with the gloves. He retired in ’89 with a career best innings to his name of only 51 not out. He even played for the winning team in the 1983 Nat West Trophy Final as a non-batting number eleven alongside Richards, Botham, Marks et al.
99: Rashid Khan
Afghanistan’s greatest ever player and right now probably the best Twenty20 bowler in the world. Amazingly he’s still only 21! He’s certainly the definition of the modern international cricketer, with 211 T20 appearances and a mere eight first-class. With umpteen contracts around the world in the short format, he hardly has time to consider a few matches in the County Championship. I reckon he’d be a useful number six but it’s as a miserly one-day leg-spinner and forceful late-order bat that he excels.
98: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
The very antithesis of those thrilling Caribbean cavaliers of the Eighties, ‘The Crab’ is nonetheless one of the West Indies’ most consistent and prolific batsman of all time. Few batsmen achieve a Test average of more than 50 and he accumulated more than 40,000 runs in all competitions. I saw him play only once, in a cold, rain-affected game for the Windies at Taunton, but in the last decade I used to follow with interest his exploits in the county game. He played on for Lancashire until just past his 44th birthday: nudging, deflecting and cutting to the very end.
97: Dennis Breakwell
One of the most under-rated members of that marvellous Somerset side of the late Seventies and early Eighties. The moustachioed Breakwell took more than 400 first-class wickets with his slow left arm spinners, a handy foil for Vic Marks’ off-spin and the pace of Garner, Botham and Moseley. Wikipedia reports that Dennis is best remembered for being clouted for six consecutive sixes (spread over two overs) by Mike Procter in a 1979 county clash. However, I prefer to recall a stunning one-handed catch at, I think, mid-on, in a televised game which had me gasping with admiration.
96: Younis Ahmed
A classy left-handed batsman whose Test career for Pakistan was interrupted thanks to an ill-advised tour of Apartheid-era South Africa. He was a familiar figure in county cricket, notably Surrey in the ‘70s. I remember watching him play in a Sunday League fixture at Chelmsford and I can still hear the satisfyingly solid sound of his bat crunching a career drive. It was the moment when I first realised cricket was more than a visual sport.
95: Tim Southee
Growing up, leftie pacemen were few and far between. Now there are so many that Tim Southee’s clever right-arm swing bowling seems to be the odd one out for New Zealand. I love his smooth, economical action which has made him a world-class performer in Tests and ODIs, and before the Coronavirus stepped in to the fray, he took 17-84 in two Tests v India this February. I was amused to learn that he also has more sixes in Tests than Tendulkar but it’s his bowling which really catches the eye.
94: Kim Barnett
His sheer weight of runs earned him a place in England’s Test sides against Sri Lanka in 1988 and Australia the following summer, although almost anyone with a bat had a go that summer! He was a wonderfully consistent opener for Derbyshire for twenty-odd summers, adding useful leg-spin to his armoury in his later years. Barnett’s bald head and ugly shuffling technique jarred with the shiny image of an Eighties sports star but in a way that’s precisely why I liked him.
93: Steve Watkin
Another county stalwart with a truncated international career, Welshman Watkin was a reliable seam bowler for Glamorgan in a fifteen-year spell. Those were the days when, if you stayed reasonably fit, you could garner 902 first-class wickets, including 94 in the 1989 season. Two years later he took five second-innings scalps in a rare victory over the West Indies but he was probably too up-and-down for England. In the mid-Nineties I watched him play a Sunday League game against Hampshire at the old Sophia Gardens, discovering how popular he was with the Cardiff faithful.
92: Paul Prichard
Although a Somerset fan, I was born and bred in Essex, and Chelmsford was the ground where I saw most of my live cricket in the 1980s and ‘90s. In the latter decade, Paul Prichard always seemed to be on the pitch. He was the regular opener, or middle-order bat in one-dayers, assuming the captaincy for four years. He wasn’t the most elegant of strokemakers but many consider him unfortunate never to represent England. However, he’s a Billericay boy like me and, weirdly enough, I once worked alongside the woman who was his girlfriend in those heady days.
91: Yuvraj Singh
On
his day, one of the most brutal hitters and canny spin bowlers in global
cricket, and he was greatly loved by the adoring Indian public. He was most
effective in the fifty-over format, and
was instrumental in India winning the 2011 World Cup. That May I captured him
laughing before a warm-up game at Taunton but it was also the year he was
diagnosed with cancer. Thankfully he recovered to play top-class cricket once
more but wasn’t quite up to the same stellar standard he had set himself.
