Alex Hales

Despite a central role in the resurgence of England's limited-overs team following the debacle of the 2015 World Cup, Alex Hales will probably be remembered more for what he missed than what he achieved. He sat out the 2019 World Cup after it emerged he had served a ban for a second drugs test failure for a recreational substance, which seemed to lead the England management and the team's senior players to decide that Hales' behaviour had caused a breakdown of trust between the parties. He was also overlooked for the 2021 T20 World Cup.

Hales had already allowed his position as first-choice opener to slip away. He was suspended from the ODI side in the aftermath of a brawl outside a Bristol nightclub in September 2017, also involving Ben Stokes, which gave Jason Roy the chance to make a successful comeback to the side.

The 6ft 5in Hales has a destructive range of off-side drives and cuts, and when he made his England debut in 2011, he was considered one of a brazen new breed of England batters who changed the conversation about the white-ball side. Sporting talent is in his genes - his grandfather once took Rod Laver to five sets at Wimbledon - and Hales was the first of his countrymen to score a T20I hundred, an unbeaten 116 against Sri Lanka in the 2014 T20 World Cup.

It still took three years for him to make his ODI debut, but his maiden one-day hundred, against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi, helped propel him into England's Test squad for their 2015-16 tour of South Africa, making him the eighth opener to try to fill the gap left by Andrew Strauss' Test retirement. Hales made 60 in his second Test, in Cape Town, and two half-centuries against Sri Lanka in the next home season, but he did not take easily to the tempo and technique required at Test level.

In one-day cricket, though, his prowess was evident. When he lashed 171 (off 122 balls) against Pakistan at his home ground, Trent Bridge, in 2016, he broke the record for the highest individual score by an England batter, held by Robin Smith for 23 years. Hales' innings helped England get to 444 for 3, then the highest innings total in an ODI.

In February 2018, Hales committed himself solely to limited-overs cricket by signing a white-ball-only contract with Nottinghamshire and playing the IPL for Sunrisers Hyderabad. He struck 147 at Trent Bridge during that rarest of things - a whitewash in a one-day series against Australia.