Tom Banton

When Tom Banton made his England return in 2025, it marked the culmination of a gradual process of relearning his game after a sharp rise was followed by a sharp fall. Banton made his T20 international debut in New Zealand a week before his 21st birthday after a breakthrough season for Somerset catapulted him into the public consciousness, earning him comparisons with Kevin Pietersen and a swathe of deals to play in franchise leagues - including the IPL. But it proved to be too much, too young: bowlers worked him out, the runs dried up, and he fell out of love with the game. "I hated cricket," he later reflected, while conceding that he "didn't train as hard as I could have".

Mercifully, that had changed by the time he reached his mid-20s. Banton had never cracked red-ball cricket while miscast as an opener but worked hard on his fundamentals with Shane Burger at Somerset and Hashim Amla at MI Cape Town, and became a County Championship regular in the middle order. It appeared to help his short-form game too: he was a standout performer in the Blast as Somerset reached back-to-back finals, winning in 2023, and was the second-highest run-scorer in the 2025 ILT20. An England return followed as the spare batter in their doomed Champions Trophy campaign, and Brendon McCullum attempted to convert him into a finisher ahead of the 2026 T20 World Cup.

Banton comes from a cricketing family: his father Colin briefly broke into Nottinghamshire's first team in the 1990s, and his younger brother Jacques was briefly on Worcestershire's books. Tom was initially part of Warwickshire's academy before moving south to finish his schooling at King's College, Taunton, once citing "the whole Jos Buttler thing" as a reason for his move. He was an England Under-19s regular, playing under Harry Brook at the World Cup in 2018 and later captaining the side himself, but 2019 proved to be his real breakthrough.

He scored 454 runs in Somerset's victorious One-Day Cup campaign, including scores of 112, 59 and 69 in the three knockout games, then cracked 549 more in the T20 Blast. His televised, 52-ball 100 against Kent was the innings of the tournament and a predictable England call-up followed. A tall, powerful player, Banton's most eye-catching shots were his hockey-inspired reverse-slaps and scoops when he first broke through, but he has become more classical as his career has progressed. His first taste of international cricket came from 2019 to 2020, and he was briefly recalled for an off-Broadway West Indies tour in early 2022 before a three-year hiatus.