Book excerpt: A cricket statistician shares his list of the greatest players of all time, and invites you to create your own imaginary team. Everyone loves to rank sportsmen, and what fan hasn’t enjoyed picking their own teams and playing imaginary matches, using dice, cards, table-top games or computers? When it comes to cricket, countless generations of fans have argued at the school playground, dinner table, pub garden, or international match about who were the greatest players of all time. In this book players are ranked, split according to their roles. Openers, middle-order batsmen, all-rounders, wicket-keepers, fast bowlers, and slow bowlers are all selected in the same proportions in which they make up a team. In a game awash with numbers, every cricket fan knows what 99.94 and 501 relate to. Some of the numbers explored here transcend the game itself and have become part of cricket’s long historical narrative. Everyone’s list is different—so let the debates begin!