Hazratullah Zazai

A tall, hulking presence at the crease, Zazai made waves as a 20-year-old by striking back-to-back half-centuries in just his second and third T20Is to ensure a series sweep of Ireland in 2018. In the final match in Bready, he single-handedly outscored Ireland with his 82 off 54 balls, which included seven sixes. By then he had already won the Shpageeza domestic T20 title with Band-e-Amir Dragons, scoring over 200 runs in seven matches in September 2017.

If that wasn't enough to grab headlines, then hitting six sixes in an over did the trick in the inaugural season of the Afghanistan Premier League in Sharjah in October 2018. Having already bashed a 44-ball ton earlier in the tournament, Zazai became the sixth batter in competitive cricket, and third in T20s, to achieve the six sixes feat after carving up left-arm spinner Abdullah Mazari to put his name alongside Yuvraj Singh and Garry Sobers, among others, in the record books. Hidden in the euphoria of the six sixes was the fact that Zazai matched Yuvraj and Chris Gayle for the fastest T20 fifty - off 12 balls. A tape-tennis ball superstar famous around Kabul before his international career took off, Zazai was locally known as "Afghan Gayle".

Four months later, Zazai smashed an unbeaten 162 off 62 balls to power Afghanistan to 278 for 3 - then the highest total in T20s - against Ireland in Dehradun.

He played the 2021 T20 World Cup and the 2022 men's Asia T20 Cup without contributing significant scores and missed most of the 2022 T20 World Cup due to injury. He was dropped from the Afghanistan side subsequently, and though he made it back, by the next T20 World Cup, in 2024 when Afghanistan made it to the semi-finals for the first time, Zazai was only looked at as an injury replacement.