Matt Prior

Matthew James Prior (born 26 February 1982) is a South African-born English former cricketer, who played for England in Test cricket and for Sussex County Cricket Club in domestic cricket. He was a wicket-keeper and his aggressive right-handed batting enabled him to open the innings in ODI matches, even when he made very limited appearance in shorter forms of the game. With an international Test debut score of 126, Prior became the first English wicket-keeper to hit a century in his debut match in early 2007. His glovework, however, was criticised. Despite a successful tour of Sri Lanka with the bat, Prior's keeping was less successful, and he was dropped from the team for the 2008 tour of New Zealand. He returned for the 2008 series against South Africa, and was retained into 2009, where he became the second-fastest England keeper to reach 1,000 Test runs, behind Les Ames. In his role as wicketkeeper, Prior has been described as 'a big talker behind the stumps' but has argued that this approach is different from the behaviour that saw him criticised during the 2007 tour by India; 'Ninety-five percent of the time, my chat is about geeing up our bowlers and the fielding unit.' He retired in June 2015 from all forms of professional cricket due to a recurring Achilles tendon injury.