Sir Garfield Sobers, widely regarded as the greatest all-rounder cricket has ever produced, has died.

Sobers died at the age of 89 on Friday at his home in Barbados, the island that shaped him from a childhood of hardship into a man of unmistakable genius.

Born in 1936, the fifth of six children, he was raised largely by his mother after his father, a merchant seaman, was lost at sea during the Second World War.