Mitchell Marsh

Mitchell Marsh, one of the most well-known surnames in Australian cricket, can bowl 140kph, and is a hard-hitting middle-order bat. He has been an alluring prospect for Australia but has struggled to cement his place at international level despite some outstanding performances on the big stage.

Marsh was earmarked for high honours, alongside his brother Shaun, ever since he captained Australia Under-19s to victory in the 2010 World Cup in New Zealand. He played state cricket at just 17, and made his T20I debut at 19 in 2011. He was also a promising junior Australian Rules footballer, and hails from a prolific sporting family - his father is Geoff Marsh, the Australia opener, and later coach and selector; his sister, Melissa, was a professional basketballer.

In 2018, Marsh was appointed Australia Test vice-captain in the wake of the ball-tampering scandal, but he was then dropped from all formats and lost his national contract due to a string of failures, at Test level in particular. In 2020 he returned to the T20I fold and the following year, starred on two tours of West Indies and Bangladesh and produced a stunning 77 not out off 50 balls in the T20 World Cup final, helping Australia to their maiden title.

Marsh made it to the Test side over Shane Watson on the 2015 Ashes tour and was given time to settle into the No. 6 role, although his bowling was arguably the stronger feature of his game at the time. That had not been the case in his debut Test series, against Pakistan in the UAE the previous year, when he scored 87 and 47 in his second Test. He never quite settled until a big century at the WACA in the third Test of the 2017-18 Ashes. He followed that with another, in Sydney - brought up amid emotional scenes with his brother at the crease - and then made a pivotal match-winning 96 in a Test win in Durban before Australian cricket plunged into crisis.

It was the start of a period of decline for Marsh too. He only played one Test during the 2018-19 home summer, failing twice with the bat against India at the MCG. He returned as part of the Ashes squad in 2019, at The Oval, where he took his maiden five-wicket haul. Later that year, he broke his hand thumping the dressing-room wall at the WACA following a dismissal in the Sheffield Shield, disrupting his career again.

He stormed back into Test contention in the 2023 Ashes after four years out of the side, replacing injured allrounder Cameron Green and producing a boundary-studded 118 at Headingley, were it not for which, Australia might have lost more emphatically than they did. In the Old Trafford Test that followed, he made a fifty and held out with a teeth-gritted 31 made over two and a half hours on the final day to secure the series as England threatened to blow Australia's house down.

In the BBL, Marsh has turned out most often for powerhouse side Perth Scorchers, winning three titles with them.