Ricky Ponting.....Punter

Ricky Thomas Ponting nicknamed Punter, is an Australian cricketer, a former captain of the Australia national cricket team between 2004 and 2011 in Test cricket and 2002 and 2011 in One Day International cricket. He is a specialist right-handed batsman, slips and close catching fielder, as well as a very occasional bowler. He represents the Tasmanian Tigers in Australian domestic cricket, the Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash League, and played in the Indian Premier League with the Kolkata Knight Riders in 2008. He is widely considered by many to be the best batsman of the modern era, along with Sachin Tendulkar of India and Brian Lara of West Indies. On 1st December, 2006, he reached the highest ever rating achieved by a Test batsman in the last 50 years.

Ponting made his first-class debut for Tasmania in November 1992, when just 17 years and 337 days old, becoming the youngest Tasmanian to play in a Sheffield Shield match. However, he had to wait until 1995 before making his One Day International (ODI) debut, during a quadrangular tournament in New Zealand in a match against South Africa. His Test debut followed shortly after, when selected for the first Test of the 1995 home series against Sri Lanka in Perth, in which he scored 96. He lost his place in the national team several times in the period before early-1999, due to lack of form and discipline, before becoming One Day International captain in early-2002 and Test captain in early-2004.

Those results didn't stop him from becoming the most successful captain in Test history after passing Steve Waugh's 41 wins in the 2009-10 Boxing Day Test. In the same match he overtook Shane Warne's 92 victories as the most by an individual, and he led Australia to 34 consecutive undefeated World Cup games. He stepped down from the captaincy when that run ended, in the 2011 World Cup. For the first three years of his reign he was in charge of a superstar unit and did not have to decide much tactically, but once that group headed for retirement he had to change from a manager to moulder.

As a batsman the only debate is where to rank him in the high reaches of the game's greatest run-makers. Acclaimed by Academy coach Rod Marsh as the best teenage batsman he had ever seen, Ponting began with Tasmania at 17 and Australia at 20, and was given out unluckily for 96 on his Test debut. There were some teething problems, including a public admission of an alcohol problem, but the longer he went on the more he matured, building up records and runs.

After being involved in over 160 Tests and 370 ODIs, Ponting is Australia's leading run-scorer in Test and ODI cricket. He is one of only three players in history to have scored 13,000 Test runs. Statistically, he is the most successful captain of all time, with 48 victories in 77 Tests between 2004 and 31 December 2010, while as a player he is also the only cricketer in history to be involved in 100 Test victories.

As of 18 July 2012 Ponting has 165 Test matches to his name and during the Sri Lanka series in 2013 could also see him creating history by becoming the most capped Australian player. Steve Waugh, the former Australian captain, has 168 Test appearances.

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Michael Bevan

Michael Gwyl Bevan is a former Australian left-handed cricket batsman and a slow left arm chinaman bowler. He was an AIS Australian Cricket Academy scholarship holder in 1989.

He played 232 ODI matches for Australia, and was a part of the 1999 and 2003 teams that won the World Cup. He was known as a "finisher" for Australia, particularly in ODIs, often leading the team to victory in the company of tail-enders.

He holds the world record One Day International batting average for retired players of 53.58. In List A cricket as a whole, Bevan has an average of over 58; the highest of any player to have scored 10,000 runs in List games. Although Bevan played most of his domestic career for the New South Wales Blues, he moved to the Tasmanian Tigers for the 2004–05 season, where he continued his successes up until his retirement in January 2007. He has also played for South Australia and in England for Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Sussex. Michael Bevan's first senior club was Weston Creek Cricket Club in Canberra.

Bevan enjoyed a promising start to his Test career with 82 in his debut innings and another two half-centuries in his first series against Pakistan in 1994-95, but he managed only a stop-start four-year campaign and was hindered by an inability to play the short ball at the highest level, which was strange as he had few problems with it in Australian or English domestic cricket. He never made a century, although he was twice unbeaten in the 80s when batting down the order and running out of partners against West Indies, who he upset with 15 wickets in the 1997-98 series. After that his Test career slid, but while he lost his baggy green he worked on making unforgettable memories in the green and gold one-day uniform, finishing with 232 appearances and a phenomenal average of 53.58 that was boosted by six centuries, 46 fifties and 67 not outs.

Born in Canberra, Bevan made his first-class debut in 1989-90 in South Australian colours, hitting a thrilling century in his first innings, before the completion of a 12-month stint at the Academy led to a move back to New South Wales. It was in Sydney that he began to make his greatest strides as a player, quickly assuming a regular middle-order berth in the strongest state team in the country and, aside from a poor run in 1992-93 which resulted in a brief omission, using it as a launching pad to the national team.

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Hansie Cronje..

Wessel Johannes "Hansie" Cronje was a South African cricketer and captain of the South African national cricket team in the 1990s. He was voted the 11th greatest South African in 2004 despite having been banned for life from professional cricket for his role in a match-fixing scandal.

He had made his debut at 18 in January 1988, joining his brother, Frans, for the Currie Cup games against Transvaal and Northern Transvaal. Innings of two and 16, then a pair, were an inauspicious start for someone who would notch up a record 15 first-class hundreds for the Free State, as well as six in one-day competitions. The following season, his unbeaten 105 against Impalas took Orange Free State into the Benson and Hedges Trophy final, where Frans's old school-friend Allan Donald blew Western Province aside with four for 18. Hansie's maiden first-class hundred followed in January 1990 when, captaining South African Universities, he hit 104 against Mike Gatting's English rebels.

At first he had hotly denied charges levelled by the New Delhi police, who during a phone-tapping operation in March 2000 heard him conspiring with an Indian bookmaker, Sanjeev Chawla, to predetermine performances. And such was his standing as a player, captain and sporting ambassador for post-apartheid South Africa that few in the cricket world doubted him, preferring to heap scorn on the Indian investigation.

Ali Bacher, managing director of the United Cricket Board of South Africa, spoke of Cronje's "unquestionable integrity and honesty". Then, four days after the accusation, Cronje confessed in a 3 a.m. phone call to Bacher that he had not been "entirely honest". He was immediately stripped of the captaincy, as his side prepared for a oneday series against Australia, and in subsequent testimony to the government-appointed King Commission revealed, sometimes in tears, further details of his involvement with bookmakers in match-fixing. The cricket world listened agog as much as aghast. The game's reputation, it seemed, was at an all-time low. Cronje's life and career were in tatters.

Cronje's appeal against his life ban was rejected by the Pretoria High Court in October 2001, and while there was talk of his having some future role in cricket, maybe coaching or in the media, he began to build a life away from the game. He enrolled on a Masters Degree course, and in February 2002 joined the Johannesburgbased firm Bell Equipment, which specialised in earth-moving machinery, as financial manager. At the time of his death he was commuting weekly to and from his home on the exclusive Fancourt Estate in George. That fateful weekend, he had hitched a ride with the two pilots of an Air Quarius Hawker Siddeley turboprop after his scheduled flight had been grounded by a hailstorm - a risk-taker to the end. More than a thousand mourners filled the Grey College Chapel for Cronje's funeral, while a thousand more outside watched the service, which was televised nationally, on large screens. It was reported that members of the UCBSA, critical earlier of their captain's betrayal, had been told they would not be welcome, but Bertha Cronje, Hansie's widow, said he would not have agreed with such a ban. The divisions were forgotten as South Africa, a nation rebuilding on forgiveness and reconciliation, mourned, in Gary Kirsten's words, "a great cricketer, a great performer and a great on-field leader of his country". It was elsewhere that cricket would still consider Hansie Cronje a tarnished hero.

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Chris Gayle....

Christopher Henry "Chris" Gayle is a Jamaican cricketer who plays international cricket for the West Indies. He captained the West Indies' Test side from 2007 to 2010. He plays domestic cricket for Jamaica, and also represents the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the Indian Premier League, the Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash League and the Barisal Burners in the Bangladesh Premier League. He has also represented Worcestershire, the Western Warriors and the Kolkata Knight Riders in his career.

Among his many strengths, perhaps the biggest one is his outstanding hand-eye coordination, which allows Gayle to regularly hit even good-length deliveries for boundaries. Technique and footwork aren't his greatest assets, but most often he compensates with other skills. No batsman has taken to the 20-over format like he has. He showed early signs of his liking for that format by smashing the first century in Twenty20 internationals - a 57-ball 117 against South Africa in the World Twenty20 in 2007 - and when Twenty20 leagues mushroomed the world over and sought international stars, Gayle was the biggest beneficiary. Over two seasons - 2011 and 2012 - of the IPL, he became easily the most feared batsman of the league, smashing three centuries leading the run charts in both seasons. And his spat with the West Indies board means he is also a Twenty20 regular in various leagues around the world, entertaining crowds in Australia, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

Gayle's free-stroking, aggressive style is obviously best suited for limited-overs cricket, but that doesn't mean he hasn't cut it as a Test batsman. When he has turned up for West Indies, his pugnacious approach has become an attacking weapon in its own right, in what's been a lean era for West Indian cricket. His 79-ball century at Cape Town in January 2004, on the back of a South African first innings of 532, was typical of his no-holds-barred approach. However, Gayle has also shown the ability to bat long periods and the hunger to make big scores. In 2009 against Australia, Gayle batted almost seven-and-a-half hours in scoring an unbeaten 165 to save the Test in Adelaide; in the very next game, though, he smashed the fifth-fastest Test century - off 70 balls - to indicate that quick-scoring remained his preferred method. Next year he batted almost ten hours and scored 333 against Sri Lanka and Muralitharan in Galle, becoming only the fourth batsman to score two triples in Tests, thus proving again his ability to bat long periods.

However, generally speaking he had a slow start to his international career, but invigorated it in 2002, ending the year with three centuries against India in November and becoming the third West Indian to score 1,000 runs in a calendar year, along with Vivian Richards and Brian Lara. He is one of only six players in One Day International history to have three or more scores of 150. In 2005, Gayle was dropped for the first Test against South Africa along with six other players following a dispute over sponsorship issues (see below). He returned for the second test but had a poor series until the fourth Test, where he made a match-saving 317. It was the first ever triple century against South Africa and up until Mahela Jayawardene made 374, it was the highest individual Test score against them.

He was also selected for team Uva Next for inaugural Sri Lanka Premier League in 2012 but his participation is in doubt after he sustained a groin injury during the West Indies’ second Test win over New Zealand in Kingston.

He is one of only four players who have scored two triple centuries at Test level: 317 against South Africa in 2005, and 333 against Sri Lanka in 2010.

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Mohammad Yousuf

Mohammad Yousuf is a Pakistani right-handed batsman. He is best known in cricket for his achievement in 2006 when he broke the world record for most Test runs in a single calendar year. Prior to his conversion to Islam in 2005, Yousuf was one of only a few Christians to play for the Pakistan cricket team.

At his best, watching Yousuf bat is an unnervingly tranquil experience, especially amid the traditional chaos of a Pakistan batting order. He has a dangerously high backlift, which makes every shot he plays, a late, unhurried afterthought, but a beautiful one. The feet take time to get going, but once they do, they dance with the best. Square and behind it on the off side are his areas, where his game is the most enchanting.

Both his life and career can be demarcated into two distinct phases. Until 2005, as Yousuf Youhana, he was only the fourth Christian to have played for Pakistan, and easily the most successful. He converted publicly to Islam late that year, after which he became a great Pakistani batsman and briefly part of as formidable a middle order as the country has seen, with Younis Khan and Inzamam-ul-Haq on either side. At least he believes there to be a link, and statistics would back that up.

Immediately after, in 2006, came his most profitable year, in fact the most profitable for any batsman ever in a calendar year. Over 11 Tests, he scored 1788 runs with nine hundreds, breaking Sir Viv Richards' 30-year-old record. If there had been a nagging doubt that he often withered when the heat was on - and the story of his rise from extremely humble backgrounds as a member of a minority religion should've wiped those away anyway - it was erased here.

Yousuf was effectively banned from playing international cricket for Pakistan, for an indefinite period by the Pakistan Cricket Board on 10 March 2010, following an inquiry into the team's defeat during the tour of Australia. An official statement was released by the Pakistan Cricket Board, saying that he would not be selected again on the grounds of inciting infighting within the team.

On 29 March 2010, Yousuf announced his retirement from all forms of international cricket, a direct reaction to the indefinite ban handed out to him by PCB. However following Pakistan's disastrous first Test against England in July/August 2010, PCB decided to ask Yousuf to come out of retirement.

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