Pedro Collins

A rare breed of left-arm pacers who grew up bowling alongside Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, Pedro Collins was an ardent footballer before taking up cricket. He became the first bowler in the history of Test cricket to earn a wicket in the first ball of a Test match on three occasions breaking the previous record of Richard Hadlee.

Collins impressed the cricketing fraternity when he picked three crucial wickets in 11 deliveries against India while featuring for West Indies A in November 1998. This magnificent performance sculpted his path into the West Indian Test side and eventually, he made his Test debut against Australia in the succeeding year.

Collins is widely remembered for an inglorious injury. He failed to connect a quicker one from Australia’s Jason Gillespie as the ball struck him on his testicles. The injury kept him out of the side for almost a year. He later put in the hard yards and returned to the side in 2001-02 with some extra pace to his deliveries.

In a Test series against India in 2006, he was roped in as a replacement for his half-brother Fidel Edwards after he endured a freak injury and claimed the wicket of Yuvraj Singh to bring up his 100th wicket in Test cricket. In 2007, Collins signed a two-year deal with English County cricket team Surrey as a Kolpak player, which ended his international cricketing career. Later in 2010, he pulled out from Surrey and got associated with Middlesex which turned out to be the final season of the veteran.

(As of April 2021)