Chris Gayle

Big-hitting Jamaican left-hander Gayle built a career on audacity and became synonymous with T20 batting even years after his retirement. Tall and imposing at the crease, he loved to carve through the covers off either foot and possessed the rare ability to turn good-length deliveries into boundary balls, making him the poster boy for the shortest format.

Gayle's outstanding hand-eye coordination allowed him to thrive without classical footwork. He offered an early glimpse of his affinity for the format by scoring the first century in men's T20Is - a 57-ball 117 against South Africa at the 2007 T20 World Cup - and when franchise leagues proliferated, he became their most bankable star.

In 2011 he was picked by Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the IPL as a replacement player after going unsold at the auction. Over the next few years, he would become the competition's most feared hitter. He was the top scorer in the league or second for three years on the bounce. His 733 runs in 2012 were peppered with an astonishing 59 sixes, an IPL record. The following year he sealed the legend when he dismantled Pune Warriors with a scarcely believable 175 off 66 balls - the IPL's highest individual score, fastest century, and contained the most sixes (17) in an innings.

For all his white-ball pyrotechnics, Gayle's Test career too was substantial. His pugnacious method, often an attacking counterpunch for a struggling West Indies side, produced both explosive bursts and marathon rearguards. A 79-ball century in Cape Town in 2004 after South Africa had piled up 532 was typical of his defiance. The next year he scored his first Test triple, against South Africa again. In Adelaide in 2009, he batted nearly seven and a half hours for an unbeaten 165 to save a Test against Australia; in the very next match, he reeled off a 70-ball hundred. (That same year, having tasted T20 stardom by then, he controversially said he wouldn't be "so sad" if Test cricket were to die out.) In 2010, he spent nearly 11 hours cobbling together 333 against Sri Lanka in Galle, becoming only the fourth man to score two Test triple-centuries.

Gayle's brisk, mostly non-turning offspin made him a handy limited-overs allrounder, and his unhurried demeanour sometimes masked a sharp cricketing mind. His international career was punctuated by prolonged standoffs with the board that kept him out of the side for stretches, but he did have an unremarkable stint as captain from 2007 to 2010. During those exiles, he became a travelling T20 attraction, lighting up leagues in Australia, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, India and beyond.

He returned to international cricket in 2012 with renewed purpose and went on to add to his white-ball legacy: he became the first to make an ODI World Cup double-hundred, the first to reach 10,000 T20 runs, and was for a long period that format's most prolific six-hitter.

Gayle retired from international cricket in 2021 as one of West Indies' most decorated batters - with over 1000 T20 sixes, more than 19,000 international runs, two T20 World Cup titles, and an enduring reputation as the game's pre-eminent entertainer.