Liam Dawson

Batting earned him attention first. At 18 he made a first-class hundred for Hampshire at Trent Bridge in September 2008, the youngest player to do so for the county, and by 2010 he had passed 1000 first-class runs. Wanting to improve his spin, he went to Zimbabwe, where he took 7/51 in his first game for the Mountaineers. He then claimed 26 wickets in the 2012 County Championship at an average under 35. In 2015 he was one of Hampshire's leading performers, returning 15 wickets at 22 and 324 runs at 64 in the domestic one-day competition. In 2019 he added 18 wickets and 271 runs from nine Royal London One-Day Cup matches.

England named him for the 2016 ICC World Twenty20 in India, though he did not play. His T20I debut came against Sri Lanka in July 2016, when he took 3/27, and a couple of months later he won his first ODI cap in a dead rubber against Pakistan. An injury to Zafar Ansari opened the door to Test cricket, and on debut against India at Chennai in December 2016 he made 66 not out, the best score by an England number eight on debut.

Picked as the first-choice spinner for the Lord's Test against South Africa in 2017, he took two wickets in each innings but was dismissed without scoring twice. He kept his place for one more Test before being dropped. Still involved in white-ball cricket, he hurt his right side while bowling in the second game of an away series in Sri Lanka in October 2018, and Joe Denly came in for him. Omitted from the preliminary 15-man squad for the 2019 World Cup, he was called up a little over a week before England's first match, but did not play as England went on to lift the trophy, and he stayed on the edge of the limited-overs side.

His versatility has made him popular on the franchise circuit. He played in Bangladesh as early as 2013 and turned out for several BPL and PSL teams, featured for London Spirit in The Hundred, and was signed by the Melbourne Stars for the BBL in 2023.