Mitchell Santner

Spin-bowling allrounder Mitchell Santner made it to the New Zealand side as a replacement for his left-armer predecessor Daniel Vettori, and though he only played 30-odd Tests in his first decade in international cricket, he went on to captain them in the white-ball formats.

Picked for the one-day squad on the tour of England following the 2015 World Cup, Santner made an immediate impression with a well-crafted 94 in a tour game against Somerset, and his ODI debut came in the first match, at Edgbaston, only 19 List A matches into his career.

His debut Test was the first ever day-nighter, against Australia in Adelaide, where he made 31 and 45 batting at No. 6 in a low-scoring game, and took two wickets. Another early highlight was his five wickets and 71 and 32 with the bat in Kanpur on the 2016 tour of India. The next time New Zealand toured India, eight years later, Santner was front and centre in a famous victory in Pune, with 13 wickets, outspinning R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja in a performance that set up a landmark 3-0 series win.

Santner was more of a regular in white-ball cricket than in Tests, and an ODI batting high point arrived in 2018 when he produced four scores of 40-plus in a row against England in the home series. He was bought by Chennai Super Kings - coached by fellow New Zealander Stephen Fleming - the following year to play in the IPL. In that 2019 tournament Santner won a game by hitting a six off the last ball against Rajasthan Royals and took 2 for 13 against Mumbai, including the prized wicket of Rohit Sharma. He won the IPL title with CSK in 2021 and 2023.

Santner's first Test century came in 2019, during an epic partnership with BJ Watling that took New Zealand to 615, their highest Test total against England. He then took three wickets in England's second innings, which helped New Zealand to a crushing innings victory.

In the ODI World Cup in England earlier that year, where New Zealand had come agonisingly close to the title, Santner bowled a clutch spell in the semi-final win over India, strangling their middle order. Three years on, at the T20 World Cup in Australia, he was a contributor in New Zealand's run to the final with nine wickets in five games, three of them in the league game win against Australia. In the ODI World Cup in India in 2023, he became the first New Zealand spinner to take five wickets in a World Cup game, against Netherlands. And in the match against Afghanistan in that tournament, he took his 100th ODI wicket, to go with the 1000-runs milestone he achieved the previous year.

In 2025, Santner, now captain in ODIs and T20Is, took 3 for 43 in the Champions Trophy semi-final in Lahore to guide New Zealand through to yet another title match.

- Mitchell Santner was a Chennai Super Kings (CSK) man for five seasons from 2019 to 2024 and was part of the title-winning units in 2021 and 2023.

- Being an overseas player and among the many spinners CSK had in their attack due to spin-friendly conditions at home, Santner never really got a proper run there; the six games he played in 2022 were the most he got in a season.

- He took 15 wickets at an economy rate of 7.06 in those six years. Santner was released by CSK before the 2025 auction, and was bought by Mumbai Indians (MI) for INR 2 crore.

- MI gave him as many as 13 games in 2025 in which Santner was very economical, going at 7.92 an over, and proved to be their best spinner.