Joel Garner

Batters would say that the overriding feeling when first confronted by Joel "Big Bird" Garner was that he would trample them, such was the foreshortening effect of his 6ft 8 inches. He possessed lively pace, which he occasionally cranked up to the brisk side of rapid, and got the ball to rear alarmingly from barely short of a length. He also had the most devastating toe-crunching yorker the game had seen since that of Charlie Griffith. Of the top wicket-takers in Test cricket, few have a lower average than his parsimonious 20.9.

Garner made his Test debut against Pakistan at home in 1977, taking 25 wickets in five Tests. He then took stacks more against all comers, home and away. Twenty-six came in the away series against England in 1980. Against Australia in March 1984, he took nine in a hard-fought draw in Georgetown when West Indies were missing Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall from the attack. He followed that up with 6 for 60 in the first innings of the next match, in Port-of-Spain. Nine more came in a career-best effort three months later at Edgbaston during the blackwash series. And against England again, in Port-of-Spain in his second to last Test series, he ran rampant with seven wickets in a crushing win.

If Garner's value in Test cricket was as an integral part of some of the most formidable pace attacks ever - they spread the load so that he took five wickets in an innings on just seven occasions - in one-day cricket, particularly in the death overs, when the unhittable yorker speared in relentlessly, he was priceless. In a period when the overall bowling average was 29.6 and the economy was four an over, Garner averaged fewer than 19 runs per wicket and conceded just over three runs an over. At Lord's in 1979, he blew England's slim hopes away with 5 for 38, the best figures ever in a World Cup final.