Dawid Malan

Dawid Malan made a striking entry into international cricket in a T20I in Cardiff in 2017, demolishing South Africa's attack with 78 from 44 balls. He deposited the second ball, from Chris Morris, over midwicket for six and never looked back.

A bludgeoning left-hand batter with power and panache, Malan was born in Roehampton but brought up in South Africa. He made his first-class debut for Boland in 2005-06. In 2006 he played 2nd XI cricket for Middlesex and Worcestershire, having made his first-team debut for Middlesex in front of 20,000 people in a T20 Cup match at The Oval. As a 20-year-old in 2008, he came in at No. 6 for Middlesex to hit a brilliant unbeaten hundred in a T20 quarter-final against a Lancashire attack containing Andrew Flintoff, Glen Chapple and Dominic Cork.

Malan made his Test debut a month after his first T20I, but his first five Tests, against South Africa and West Indies, were far from exceptional, with an average of 23. However, England calculated he possessed fortitude, and at 30, the know-how to handle an Ashes series in Australia. He did exactly that by scoring England's first hundred of that 2017-18 series after they got to the WACA 2-0 down. It was a tough, grown-up innings at a time when England had to answer charges of off-field immaturity.

But he was dropped from the Test side after three poor matches in the 2018 summer and it took him three years to make a comeback. Towards the end of 2019, he won a place in England's T20I squad touring New Zealand, and recorded England's fastest century in the format at the time - a 48-ball century in Napier, which played a significant role in the 3-2 series scoreline.

He was one of the leading run-scorers in T20Is in 2020 and his half-centuries in South Africa, including an unbeaten 99, took England to No. 1 in the format at the end of the year. Malan himself was the reigning batter in T20Is when he got his Test recall in 2021. But although he was one of three England batters, along with Joe Root and Ben Stokes, to score at least two half-centuries in the Ashes that winter, he was dropped from the side after England lost the series 4-0.

Malan topped the run-scoring charts in the 2022 Hundred, making 377 runs at a strike rate of 167 in a title-winning campaign for Trent Rockets, and though he missed the 2022 T20 World Cup final through injury, he picked up a winner's medal that winter, as England became the first men's team to hold both the 50- and 20-over titles concurrently.