What is the greatest Test century of all time?

South Africa captain Graeme Smith sweeps for a four against England at Edgbaston in 2008. Photograph: Nick Potts/PA

In 136 years of Test cricket there has been 3,649 Test centuries scored by 697 batsmen, from Sir Donald Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar to Ajit Agarkar and Saqlain Mushtaq. Whittling those down to the top 100 is not the easiest task, but that's what Patrick Ferriday has done in his new book Masterly Batting (a copy of which you can win at the bottom of the page).

Ferriday, author of the superb Before The Lights Went Out has spent two years preparing the book with a team of six researchers. This is not just a pub argument in written form: it is mixture of quantitative and qualitative judgements, the product of research so hardcore that the Spin is rather jealous it wasn't involved.

All Test centuries were measured in 10 categories: size, percentage of team score, speed, bowling attack, pitch conditions, chances given, match impact, series impact, compatibility of attack and conditions, intangibles.

Ferriday says the list does not purport to be definitive, but "the combination of detailed research and intelligent application give us a fascinating 100". Having seen the list, the Spin would certainly concur.

Top of the list is an innings with which, says Ferriday, "I can find no flaw".

Each of the 100 innings have their own essay. The Spin should declare an interest here: we wrote the piece on Graeme Smith's granite-willed 154 not out against England at Edgbaston in 2008, an extract of which is below. But don't let that put you off, etc: the list of writers includes David Frith, Stephen Chalke, Derek Pringle (who covers an innings for which he had the best seat in the house at the non-striker's end, Graham Gooch's immense 154 against West Indies in 1991) and the Guardian's own Daniel Harris.

PATRICK FERRIDAY ON BOB BARBER'S 185 AT SYDNEY IN 1965-66

The 1960s – free love, walls torn down and young men and women casting off shackles and burning bras; a decade of vibrant colour. Not in cricket it wasn't. After the false dawn of the tied-Test series of 1960-61, international cricket sank into a 10-year malaise of slow attritional batting where a first day score of 210-3 was regarded as a solid achievement. There were, of course, the brilliant exceptions: Pollock, Sobers and Kanhai and, briefly, Dexter and Milburn but this was the age of the run-digger Bill Lawry and his acolytes.

Bob Barber played another game. As a young amateur he had been shackled by excessive caution but in a reverse of most careers he became more carefree with age and carefree suited him well. His England record had been patchy but by 1964 he had become a regular; an aggressive, some would say impetuous, left-handed opener and useful leg-break bowler although at the start of the series he was still looking for a maiden Test century.

The first two matches sank in a morass of big and slow scores but at Sydney everything changed for five glorious hours. The pitch was good and the attack only moderate but the manner of Barber's batting was breathtaking. "What I really want to do," he had said earlier on the tour, "is to play one innings as I think the game should be played. And I want to play it at Sydney." The lunch score of 93-0 with Barber on 57 was some indication that he was about to fulfil his desires. Only an hour later he moved effortlessly to his century and when, just before tea, his partner Boycott was out for 83 the pair had put on 234. After the break, John Edrich took the Boycott role, nudging and pushing but most of all enjoying the superb entertainment emanating from the other end. For another hour Barber flayed all-comers before succumbing to weariness, being dismissed for 185 scored off 255 balls. This wasn't how it was done on the first day of a Test and he was given a rousing reception by a 40,000-strong home crowd. English batsmen had performed great deeds in Australia but nothing like this on an opening day since George Gunn in 1907.

The plaudits rolled in – John Woodcock called it "one of the truly great displays of batting in Test cricket", Wisden dubbed it "the superlative achievement of the whole tour" and Australian opener Lawry was equally effusive.

Despite a middle-order collapse on day two, England posted a big score and, on a crumbling wicket, dismissed Australia twice for an innings victory. Australia were to level the series with a re-modelled team featuring just two specialist bowlers – the Ashes had reverted to hard-nosed grind.

Frank Tyson described the series as 'most engrossing' but 50 years later it looks mighty dull, with one exception – the shining light of Bob Barber's one and only Test century.

GRAEME SMITH'S 154* AT EDGBASTON IN 2008

Smith's next scoring stroke was the most cathartic of his career. He pulled his old friend Pietersen for four to move to 154 and seal South Africa's first series victory in England since the pre-isolation days of Graeme Pollock and Eddie Barlow. His team charged on to the field to embrace a man who was both peer and hero. Smith faced 246 balls, hitting 17 fours. He had withstood tennis elbow, a bad back, a dodgy sightscreen, the force of Flintoff's personality, the rough outside his off stump, a lack of solids, a 47-over session and 45 years of history. He left pieces of his soul all over the Edgbaston wicket. If great and legend are the most abused words in sport, then epic is not far behind. Even the most pedantic, curmudgeonly patriot in England would concur this was an epic innings. Perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay Smith is that the scale and manner of that innings were not remotely surprising. It is the innings he was born to play.

On a personal level, Smith upgraded the archetypal captain's innings for the 21st century. It had all the over-my-dead-body qualities associated with the genre, but its purpose was victory rather than the avoidance of defeat, and he scored at a 21st-century strike-rate of 63. In some ways this was the completion of an almost Shakespearean character arc. He lost his way after the spectacular start to his captaincy career in England in 2003. He went two-and-a-half years without a Test century between 2005 and 2007 and was often criticised for immaturity or boorishness and embarrassingly misplaced machismo. He did not make the Wisden Almanack list of the world's 40 best players in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, still aged only 27, he matured into the spiritual heir to Steve Waugh he had promised to be on the previous tour of England.

Smith scored 277 at Edgbaston on that tour. This innings trumped it comfortably. It is one of cricket's fascinations that 154 can be greater than 277, 153 greater than 375 and 154 greater than 333. Everybody knew instinctively that this was an innings Smith would never top. Just as you can't put the genie back in the bottle, so you can't put the monkey back on the back.

It is the second-highest innings by a captain in a successful fourth-innings run chase, behind Don Bradman's 173 not out at Headingley in 1948. Captains are supposed to set the tone but Smith knows it's even more important to set the tone in a different sense – to cement the final judgement of a match. He is a rough-track bully, addicted to tough runs.

The opportunity to play this kind of innings is what gets Smith going, and he is the only man in history to score 1,000 Test runs in successful fourth-innings chases. That includes four centuries. Only one other captain – Ricky Ponting – has managed even two. Smith is arguably cricket's greatest triumph of substance over style, a man who can will his way to Test hundreds. And, while this was one of his better-looking innings – there was plenty going on in the V – it is remembered for its significance rather than its aesthetics.

Smith bent a match, a series and even history to his granite will. Thereafter South Africa's series in England would be discussed in entirely different terms. Instead of wondering if South Africa would ever win, focus turned to whether Smith would see off another England captain. Michael Vaughan resigned the day after Smith's 154, following Nasser Hussain's decision to quit in 2003. And four years later, Smith's team prompted the retirement of Andrew Strauss as well.

It is easy to forget, in view of England's lost years under Peter Moores, just how much victory meant, both to South Africa in 2008 and India a year earlier. Smith described it as the "first massive stepping stone" of a team who went on to become irrefutably the world's best. In some ways it was also their final frontier, not because of what they achieved so much as what they had been through to achieve it. South Africa won in Australia for the first time later that year, a far greater feat but one that, following heavy beatings in 2001-02 and 2005-06, came out of nowhere rather than at the end of a long journey. The win in England was not just for his current team-mates: it was for Hansie Cronje, Kepler Wessels, Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Gary Kirsten and the others who had been denied in 1994, 1998 and 2003.

After the match Smith returned to the dressing room to drink with his team-mates. "Jeez it was a really special feeling." For a consummate team man, these are the moments that take up a lease in the memory bank. Amid the dressing-room celebrations, McKenzie and Boucher made Smith "down a beer or two in a compromised position for having die groot balles to bat through to the end". The team eventually went back to the Radisson Hotel to continue their celebrations. At around 11pm, Smith realised he had not eaten all day, and slipped out to eat alone at a Lebanese cafe near the hotel. He says that, as he sat fiddling with a plastic knife and fork and a paper plate, the scale of the achievement sank in for the first time.

The team shambled to bed in the small hours. The following morning Smith was ripped from his sleep – not by nerves this time but by a fire alarm, which kept the players out on the street for 45 minutes. His back and his elbow hurt; he had a pulsating hangover. Graeme Smith awoke feeling dreadful. It was the most beautiful pain of his life