Top 10 South African batsmen of all time

5 Herschelle Gibbs

Not many mavericks go on to become a great batsman and certainly not if he is an opening batsman in all forms of the game.

However, Herschelle Gibbs is different and in a career that lasted around 14 years, he became one of South Africa’s biggest match winners and is rightly considered among the great ones to have been produced by the country. He was unorthodox and he could take on any bowler on his day.

Tests or ODIs could be decided by an innings of savagery that often left the opposition stunned. In 90 Tests, he scored 14 hundreds but his true greatness lay in the one-day game in which he hammered 21 centuries in 248 games.

The 175 he scored against Australia to help chase down the target of 434 remains one of the greatest ODI innings ever played.