Really tough to rate after top few with so many greats around. I think, top 5 are almost fixed for everyone with many be minor changes in order. It’s the next bunch where it’s really difficult. Among the last 4 (# 6-9), one can place them in any order, but I picked my order for certain considerations.
Walsh wasn’t a strike bowler; he is probably the best ever stock bowler, but it was the decline of WI cricket that allowed him to take the new ball - till Benjamin’s (Winston & Kenny), Bishop & Rose; he actually didn’t open with Ambrose. Walsh had a fantastic smooth action, which despite being a fast bowler, allowed him to play Test cricket for almost 17 years, and he maintained a fantastic average being part of the greatest fast bowling unit in history; but other three had better reputations as the strike bowler, and unfortunate to some extent. Wes Hall retired at 31 and played only 48 Tests; Clark was a fearsome fast bowler who opted to leave for SAF and Bishop was injury prone; played last Test even before reaching 29. At their prime, I believe each one was better than Walshi.
And to [MENTION=132062]Harsh Thakor[/MENTION]
I love Courtney Walsh. I'm the one who raised his 7-37 and 6-18 at Wellington in 1994-95. But having grown up watching County Cricket, I must say a few long-forgotten things about Courtney Walsh.
Walsh was born at the end of October 1962. By the mid-1980's he was a stalwart fast bowler at Gloucestershire - the best foreign player that they had had since Mike Procter.
But he just couldn't break into the West Indies team. He wasn't quite good enough.
He was tall and he was quick-ish - around 140K. But there was any number of West Indian players in his era who were better than him: not just Roberts/Holding/Garner/Marshall but also Croft and Clarke and Stephenson and Moseley (all of whom went to South Africa) and then Bishop, who was the most talented of the lot.
Walsh was mainly a reserve until Bishop fractured his spine in 1991 - by which time Walsh was almost 30. There would be overseas tours that the senior bowlers would opt out of, and there were opportunities when Roberts and then Garner and then Holding retired. But Walsh wasn't quite good enough to replace them.
Pakistan toured the West Indies in 1987-88 when Garner and Holding had just retired, although Ambrose was on debut replacing Garner. Walsh played all 3 Tests - and he took 4 wickets in 86 overs at 57.50 in a low-scoring series.
Then immediately afterwards, on his favourite surfaces in England, in a 4-0 series victory he took just 12 wickets in 5 Tests at 34.33 as England barely scored a run all summer.
We had arrived at the point at which Ian Bishop exploded onto the scene. And the first choice attack was clearly Ambrose and Bishop to open the bowling with Marshall and another quick - often Winston Benjamin - in support.
By the time England toured the West Indies in 1989-90 - famously the first series ever broadcast live from the Caribbean, by BSkyB - Walsh was a fringe player, a reserve who literally was in one match, out the next.
And then Bishop's back gave way. And suddenly the West Indies realized that they had a pace attack built on attrition and keeping the scoring rate down, with the two strike bowlers (Bishop and Marshall) struck down by injury and age respectively.
And that is where Courtney Walsh so successfully reinvented himself.
Up until now for the last 14 years there had really been no hierarchy of strike bowler and stock bowler roles in the West Indies team, or of bowling with the wind or into the wind. The problem now - around 1991- was that nobody was quicker or faster or more devastating than anyone else once Bishop got his injury.
Pakistan came pretty close to dethroning the West Indies in both 1987-88 and 1990-91, and then straight afterwards the Australians nearly did so in the Caribbean.
The West Indies survived those scares, but the pace attack needed to operate differently.
And it was actually Sir Richie Richardson who came up with the solution when he took over from Viv Richards. He recognized that Bishop may never regain his former level, but that Ambrose had the capacity to be more of a strike bowler than the Garner-like stock bowler that he had been used as.
On the legendary tour to Australia in 1992-93 Bishop was back, but Richardson had changed Walsh's role to strictly being an into-the-wind support bowler. He only took 12 wickets in 5 Tests at 39 runs apiece, but the change seemed to work - Walsh was very difficult to score off.
And for the next decade that became Walsh's role. He abandoned any pretence of being a typical West Indies fast bowler. He cut back his pace and his length and became a stifling 130-135K bowler who bowled a length that you couldn't drive or cut. And this allowed Ambrose to attack more at the other end.
He was a very fine bowler in that role. But to be honest, this is a man who wasn't a Test regular even when England toured in 89-90, when he was 27 years of age. He basically had Ian Bishop's career, and he had it because his body was stronger and more durable than Bishop's.