Ian Botham

Ian Botham was cricket's great force of nature, a box-office all-rounder who bent matches to his will through the late 1970s and 1980s. He could turn a Test on its head with a brutal counter-attack or a spell of swinging, rasping fast-medium bowling that left batsmen groping. His 383 Test wickets, with 27 five-wicket hauls, briefly stood as the world record when he passed Dennis Lillee in 1986, but statistics never captured the menace or the sheer theatre he brought to the field.

Botham's career swung between astonishing brilliance and controversy. The 1981 Ashes remain his monument: after resigning the captaincy on the back of a pair at Lord's, he produced a run of performances that wrestled the urn from Australia almost single-handedly. At Headingley his 149 not out from a follow-on position turned a lost cause into a famous win, at Edgbaston he took 5 for 11 to finish the match, and at Old Trafford he hammered a savage 118. He was arguably never better, or more needed.

Off the field, Botham was relentless in his charity work, walking thousands of miles for leukaemia research, a cause he took up after visiting young patients in a Taunton hospital. He captained England 12 times with mixed results and remained a fixture in the game's culture long after retirement, as a pundit and a larger-than-life personality later knighted and elevated to the House of Lords. His 5,200 Test runs, 14 centuries and that 1981 summer put him permanently into English folklore.