Glenn Turner

Before New Zealand cricket had a genuine global superstar, it had Glenn Turner, whose sheer weight of runs forced the wider game to sit up and take his country seriously. Turner treated cricket with a single-minded professionalism rare for his generation, and in doing so turned himself from a watchful, defensive opener into one of the heaviest run-scorers the sport has ever produced.

His international career began in inauspicious fashion with a duck on Test debut against the West Indies in 1969. The real shaping of his game, though, happened away from the international stage, through 15 years at Worcestershire in county cricket, where he gradually shed his cautious early approach and added genuine strokeplay to an already sound technique. His most celebrated exploit came against the West Indies in 1972, where his innings of 259 in Georgetown were prolific enough that home crowds nicknamed him "Mistah Runs." Two years later, he became the first New Zealander to score a century in each innings of a Test match, doing so against Australia in the same match that delivered New Zealand's first-ever Test win over their trans-Tasman rivals.

It's in the broader first-class record book, though, that Turner's output looks almost unmatched by New Zealand standards. His 103 first-class centuries place him in an extremely elite group. Over the course of his career, Turner took on the New Zealand captaincy, leading the side in ten Tests, but stepped down after clashing with the sport's administrators over a home series defeat to Australia, which kept him away from the international game for years before a short comeback series in 1983 brought his playing days to a close. His standing in the game was later recognised with induction into both the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and the New Zealand Cricket Hall of Fame among its inaugural members.