Ish Sodhi

Indian-origin legspinner Ish Sodhi moved to Auckland with his parents as a child, left school early and trained with Dipak Patel and Matt Horne to make it into the New Zealand ranks as a 20-year-old. A decade into his career, he was New Zealand's most prolific T20I spinner, and not too far behind in ODIs.

Sodhi struggled somewhat to establish himself in regional representative teams. Auckland's pitches, which provide little aid to spin bowlers, and captains who have been traditionally ill equipped with knowledge of how to use slow bowlers, didn't help. Despite that, he became a force in the domestic first-class game. For Northern Districts in the seven Plunket Shield seasons starting in 2012-13, his mastery of turn and flight fetched him 181 wickets. Forty of those came in just seven games, in 2016-17; the next year, equally as strikingly, he took 28 wickets in the four games he played in the competition.

After his encouraging debut first-class season, Sodhi earned a Test debut in Bangladesh late in 2013. He picked up eight wickets in the drawn two-Test series in the West Indies a few months later but was then out of the side for over a year and a half. Sodhi spent more time out of the team than in it after that - about as much as a New Zealand spinner not called Daniel Vettori can expect. He did, however, pull 13 wickets out of his hat in the 2022 series in Pakistan, though the 0-0 scoreline didn't quite bear witness.

In T20Is, he has been much more of a main character. In the 2016 T20 World Cup, he took ten wickets in five games at 12 runs apiece in New Zealand's run to yet another ICC tournament semi-final. Come the next World Cup year, he set himself up nicely with 13 wickets and a Player-of-the-Series award in a series win against Australia at home, and took nine wickets in the World Cup in the UAE, where New Zealand were losing finalists.

In ODIs, Sodhi didn't get quite as many chances on the biggest stages, playing only one match in the 2019 and 2023 World Cups - for reasons of conditions and team composition respectively, though he might have expected better after he set himself up for the latter tournament with 6 for 39 in a game against Bangladesh ahead of it.

For someone who has played as many T20s as Sodhi, he is perhaps conspicuously absent from many leagues around the world - apart from the Blast in England, where he took 34 wickets over two seasons, 2017 and 2018.