Ijaz Ahmed

Pakistan No. 3 Ijaz Ahmed, ungainly, with a closed-off stance and a bottom-hand-heavy technique, did not win any batting beauty contests in his time. There was no doubting his calibre as a player, though: he made 12 Test hundreds and averaged a little under 40 overall; in about half his matches, against West Indies, Australia and England, that number went up to 50 or thereabouts.

Ijaz made his Test debut in the first match of the 1987 series in India, failed, and was dropped for the rest of the tour. Later that year in England, he made 50 from No. 8 at Headingley, in the Test Pakistan won to eventually take the series 1-0.

His first Test hundred came the following year, against Australia in Faisalabad - a crucial 122 after Pakistan had slipped to 25 for 4. Again, in the return series, early in 1990, he made a resolute second-innings hundred that saved his side the blushes after they folded for 107 first time round. By the end of that year, though, after a string of low scores, Ijaz was dropped.

He was brought back four years later and made a better fist of it. His 137 in Sydney in 1995 against McDermott, Warne and McGrath, in an innings where no one else made 40, fetched Pakistan a hard-fought win. That year was his most productive in Test cricket. By then he had moved up to No. 3, and it was from there that he made a big hundred against England, in Leeds again, and then back to back against New Zealand and Sri Lanka in 1996-97. Australia were at the receiving end once more when they toured Pakistan in 1998; Ijaz averaged 140, with two hundreds, in Peshawar and Karachi, after missing the first match, which the visitors memorably won.

His last Test hundred, like his first, came against Australia a few months after his highest score, 211 in the Asian Test Championship against Sri Lanka in Dhaka. It was a positively Gilchrist-ian second-innings 115 off 160 balls in a Perth drubbing for Pakistan in 1999.

That year, he made a hundred in the Coca Cola Cup triangular tournament in Sharjah, which Pakistan won, but Ijaz was generally not as impressive a white-ball batter as in Tests. He played almost as many games in Sharjah as he did in Pakistan, but he was not quite at home in the UAE, averaging 28 with one century against 42 with five hundreds in Pakistan. He didn't quite shine in the two World Cups in which Pakistan made the final in his time either (he was more of a bowler in the 1992 tournament but his roundarm medium-pacers hardly troubled anyone). Against his favourite Test opponents Australia, he averaged under 20 in ODIs.