Ross Whiteley

T20 hitter Ross Whiteley can send the ball miles, fields athletically, and often works up a decent head of pace with his left-arm seamers, but he has not always been able to translate potential into performance.

His unbeaten 91 off 35 deliveries swept Worcestershire into the quarter-finals of the NatWest T20 Blast in 2015. Only Chris Gayle had a higher strike rate among batters who made 300 runs in the tournament that season.

After graduating through the Derbyshire youth system, Whiteley was given a first-team opportunity in 2008, before breaking through properly in 2011, when he averaged just over 40 and scored a couple of centuries. He swept the six that saw Derbyshire promoted as Division Two champions at the end of 2012, at which point it seemed the club had developed an allrounder who would serve them well for years. But after representing England in the Hong Kong Sixes that winter, he fell out with the Derbyshire management midway through the 2013 season and moved to Worcestershire, whom he helped into the T20 quarter-finals in 2014.

Three years on, he played in his first overseas league, the BBL, for Sydney Sixers, and the following year he turned out for Multan Sultans in the PSL in three games and came away with not much to show for it. Whiteley switched clubs again in 2021, moving to Hampshire, for whom he slotted into the Southern Brave side as a hard-hitting lower-middle-order bat in the first two seasons of the Hundred.