Atherton c Healy b McGrath

Some statistics, like Bradman's average and the number of centuries Gavaskar made, are known to pretty much every cricket buff. But The List will bring you facts and figures that aren't so obvious, adding fuel to those fiery debates about the most valuable middle-order bat, and the most useless tailender. If there's a particular List that you would like to see, e-mail us with your comments and suggestions.

Mike Atherton's worst nightmare probably starts with the sight of a tall fast bowler running in, armed with a hungry slip cordon, the ball rearing steeply from a good length, a nervous prod outside the off stump followed by raucous shouts celebrating a regulation catch and a typical dismissal.

And that fast bowler could well have been Glenn McGrath, Curtly Ambrose or Courtney Walsh. Atherton claims three of the top four spots in the list of batsmen most dismissed by a particular bowler. In 44 Tests - 17 against Australia with McGrath and 27 against West Indies - Atherton fell to one of these three bowlers a staggering 53 times. And the Atherton-McGrath affair has occurred on an astonishing 19 occasions.

Brian Lara, contributing 14 wickets to McGrath's tally, is the only current batsman in the top 30. McGrath famously predicted that Lara would be his 300th scalp but the icing on the cake was that he was the second wicket of a hat-trick as well.

All the bowlers in the list, with the exception of Kapil Dev, are from Australia, England and the West Indies. The glaring absences are Richard Hadlee, Imran Khan, Allan Donald and Muttiah Muralitharan.

Adam Gilchrist is 20 catches short of becoming the first wicketkeeper to take a 100 catches off a single bowler. In Gilchrist's case, it's McGrath making yet another appearance. Rod Marsh finished his career with 95 catches off Dennis Lillee. Interestingly, the top five fielder-bowler combinations all involve spinners: Mahela Jayawardene and Muralitharan with 49 dismissals closing in on Mark Taylor and Shane Warne's 51.

Wasim Akram and Chaminda Vaas, one-day titans with 832 wickets between them, share ten entries in the top 30. No bowler has accounted for some of one-day cricket's most feared openers - Saeed Anwar, Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Shahid Afridi and Herschelle Gibbs - more often than Vaas has. And he's just two behind Shaun Pollock's ten dismissals of Adam Gilchrist. Ajit Agarkar is quite a surprise entry as high up as No. 7, having dismissed Sanath Jayasuriya on nine occasions.

Trivia

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