Rilee Rossouw

A stylish top-order player with an elegant and authoritative drive, Rilee Rossouw has been a high-impact batter for South Africa in limited-overs cricket.

He first came to attention in the 2008 Under-19 World Cup, after which he was the leading run-scorer in the South African first-class competition in 2009-10, with 1189 runs at 66.05. But though he went on to average over 40 in first-class cricket in 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14, he was unable to break into to the Test team.

Eventually, in August 2014, Rossouw was included in a South Africa ODI squad, but he had a nightmarish start in international cricket, racking up four ducks in his first six innings. The selectors, though, stuck with him and he was included in the T20 squad for the Australia tour in November 2014, where he scored 78 in his first match.

Two months on, Rossouw made his first international century, against West Indies in Johannesburg, in the match where AB de Villiers broke the record for fastest ODI hundred, and he averaged 52 in the six games he played in the ODI World Cup that followed.

In October 2016 he hit a sensational 122 to secure a 5-0 ODI series win over Australia, but he announced early the next year that he had signed for Hampshire as a Kolpak. He made an immediate impact in England, smashing a career-best 156 against Somerset in the Royal London Cup.

Rossouw became a man in demand on the franchise T20 circuit at the tail end of the 2010s and into the next decade, finishing the 2018-19 Bangladesh Premier League as the leading run-scorer, with 558 runs. He won the Pakistan Super League with Quetta in 2019 and two years later with Multan Sultans; in 2022 he made 275 runs as Sultans made it to the final again and lost.

Later that year, the UK having exited the European Union, Rossouw, no longer able to qualify to play county cricket other than as an overseas player, returned to South Africa colours. He did so with a bang, making an unbeaten 96 and two back-to-back T20I hundreds as their No. 3 in his first few innings back, against England, India and Bangladesh - the last of those in the World Cup, where South Africa eventually endured a shock exit at the hands of Netherlands.