James Vince

Elegant England and Hampshire batter James Vince has a wide range of strokes and an ability to time the ball shared by few. He was for a time hailed as the next Michael Vaughan, and given several opportunities in the national side across formats, but he didn't quite seize them, and in the second half of his career went on to reinvent himself as a gun for hire in T20 leagues around the world.

Vince averaged 19 in his first seven Tests against Sri Lanka and Pakistan, in 2016, and displayed an unfortunate fallibility when driving outside off stump. He did manage an ODI fifty against Sri Lanka and showed more promise in T20Is, but overall his undoubted style was not matched by substance.

He only averaged 33 in the County Championship in 2017, but was picked for the Ashes in Australia, where though he began with an impressive 83 in Brisbane, he only passed 50 once in his next eight innings. Despite 76 in a draw in New Zealand, he was axed again in the English summer.

He responded with an unbeaten 201 against Somerset but was overlooked for England all the same. He topped Hampshire's averages with close on 1000 runs, and produced a sublime 171 in a limited-overs game against Yorkshire, but he ended that 2018 county season feebly, with no score above 30 in his last nine innings.

A Wiltshire boy, Vince broke into the Hampshire side in 2009 and averaged over 50 in his first round of limited-overs matches before impressing again for England at the Under-19 World Cup. He confirmed his pedigree the following year with 180 against a Yorkshire attack that included Ajmal Shahzad, Tim Bresnan and Adil Rashid. In 2012 he averaged 55.50 as Hampshire won the Clydesdale Bank 40, and he won the domestic T20 competition twice in his first three years. In 2013 he passed 1000 first-class runs in a season for the first time - a mark he bettered in 2014 with a mighty 1525 runs at 61 in his side's Division Two win. That year he also made a superb 93 from 51 balls to win Hampshire their T20 Blast quarter-final against Nottinghamshire; in 2015 he was incandescent in the tournament, making six scores of over 60, and 710 runs in total, the most overall, but Hampshire went out against Lancashire in the semi-final again.

England Lions and Hampshire captaincy responsibilities came Vince's way in 2015, at the ripe old age of 24, and so did an England one-day debut (in an abandoned game against Ireland). Nine games into his ODI career, he was picked for the 2019 World Cup, where his failures in the three games he played were eclipsed by England's title-winning success. Two years on, he finally hit something like pay dirt in the format when he made a fifty in a low-scoring ODI against Pakistan at Lord's and then a hundred in a high-scoring one at Edgbaston that produced a 3-0 series sweep for England, but there was to be no fairy-tale second wind.

As if reconciled to his England career having wound down, Vince buckled down to producing runs by the shedload for his county, making just shy of 5000 runs in the championship over six seasons, though Hampshire didn't win silverware in that time.

In 2022, he led from the front with two hundreds, and struck at close to 150, as Hampshire won their first domestic T20 title in a decade. Elsewhere, with his T20 globetrotter cap on, Vince won back-to-back titles with Sydney Sixers in the BBL: in 2021, the second of those years, he made consecutive 90s in Player-of-the-Match performances at the pointy end.