Muttiah Muralitharan

Batsmen did not so much face Muttiah Muralitharan as endure an ordeal of the mind. With that coiled-wrist action and the doosra that exploded off the pitch, he turned every over into a minefield of misjudgment. More than flight or turn, it was his relentless accuracy and the threat of the next delivery that made him a nightmare. He did not just take wickets; he dismantled techniques.

Muralitharan emerged from Kandy, a spinner with a hypermobile wrist and an unusual action that some saw as a flaw but which he converted into the most devastating weapon in spin bowling. For nearly two decades he perplexed the world's best, including Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara. His rivalry with Shane Warne defined an era, but while Warne ripped it, Murali bent it; the doosra was his great unanswerable question.

He finished with 800 Test wickets, a record that may never be beaten, and 534 in one-day internationals. His 16 wickets at The Oval in 1998, including 9 for 65 in the second innings, remain among the great match performances in England, and his career-best 9 for 51 came against Zimbabwe in 2002. A member of Sri Lanka's 1996 World Cup-winning squad, he took ten wickets in a Test a record 22 times.

Muralitharan took his 800th wicket with the final ball of his last Test in 2010 and retired from internationals after the 2011 World Cup, with 1,347 wickets across formats. He endured years of scrutiny over his action, was repeatedly cleared, and kept taking wickets through it all. He has since worked as a spin-bowling coach around the world.