Birthday special: Joel Garner – The fearsome giant also known as Big Bird
The extremely tall Joel Garner’s name stands tall in the esteemed list of all-time greats of West Indies. The West Indies star pacer was one of the significant members of the highly regarded West Indies team of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Garner has been ranked as the highest-rated ODI bowler in the ICC’s best ever bowler ratings. He is ranked 37th on the same list in Test cricket.
In combination with other Caribbean greats and pacers like Michael Holding, Andy Roberts, Colin Croft, and later, Malcolm Marshall, Curtly Ambrose, and Courtney Walsh, West Indies cricket saw new highs. The West Indies team didn’t lose a single Test series in 15 years, and nations looked at the country in great awe. In 2010, Garner was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.
#HappyBirthday #JoelGarner
58 tests, 259 wickets at 20.97 with a strike rate of 50.8!
In ODI’s, he bagged 146 wickets in 98 matches at an average of 18.84 with a strike rate of 36.5 & economy of 3.09 per over!
881 First Class Wickets in 214 Matches at 18; SR of 45! Outstanding pic.twitter.com/X8h2rNg23D— Basit Subhani (@BasitSubhani) December 16, 2020
He rose to fame while plying his trade for Littleborough and came to the attention of Somerset. He played in place of Sir Garry Sobers as the club’s paid man for the 1976 season. During his three year stay with Littleborough, he amassed more than 1500 runs and took 334 wickets to make his presence a brilliant one. Garner appeared in 58 Test matches in 10 years to scalp 259 wickets at an average of a little over 20. It made him one of the most effective pacers of all time.
Joe Garner- the most feared pacer of his time
Joel Garner’s 6 ft 8-inch tall stature helped him in making his mark in the limited-overs game as he produced some pinpoint yorkers and stunned batsmen with unusual bouncers. Back at that time, he was the tallest pacer to play the longest format of the game. He donned the West Indies jersey in 98 ODIs clinching 146 wickets. As per the records till January 2020, he was only one of the two players to have more than 100 ODI wickets, at an average of below 20 runs per wicket.
He registered some epic figures (5/39) in the 1979 Cricket World Cup final against England, and it remains the best performance by a bowler in the final of the most high-profile cricket tournament. He was also an integral part of the team that made it to the 1983 ICC Cricket World Cup final and stitched the highest partnership for the 10th wicket in the history of the World Cup along with Sir Andy Roberts.
Until the cricket world saw the appearance of 7ft 1 inch tall Pakistan speedster Mohammad Irfan, Garner, along with former Australian pacer Bruce Reid and Irish pacer Boyd Rankin, was the tallest players to have ever played international cricket.
