Keshav Maharaj - South Africa - Bowler

Keshav Maharaj is a committed and wholehearted performer. A calculating left arm orthodox spinner who can bowl at any stage of the innings and a handy right-handed lower order batsman, Maharaj made his first-class debut at the age of 16 for KwaZulu-Natal in 2006-07. He was promoted to the Dolphins team in 2009-10.

He toured Bangladesh with the South Africa Academy in April-May 2010, taking 13 wickets in the two four-day matches against Bangladesh Cricket Board Academy. He also took 4 for 12 off four overs, opening the bowling, in one of the T20 matches. He played for South Africa A against the touring Bangladesh A team in 2010-11.

He played for Cuckfield in the Sussex Premier League in 2013. He signed to play as a professional for Nelson in the Lancashire League in 2015. He was included in the KwaZulu-Natal cricket team squad for the 2015 Africa T20 Cup.

A consistent performer, Maharaj strode into the national team on the back of a fine domestic season and was taken as the first-choice spinner on the tour of Australia in late 2016. A classical left-arm spinner, Maharaj has since then emerged as the ideal foil for South Africa's stellar pace attack. On helpful surfaces, he can be South Africa’s trump card, as reflected during the tour of New Zealand, where he emerged as South Africa's leading bowler with 15 wickets. He followed it up with 17 wickets from four Tests against England. An ODI debut followed in 2017 during South Africa’s tour to England and he was also included in the squad for 2017 Champions Trophy.

Maharaj played County Cricket in 2018 and 2019 representing Lancashire and Yorkshire respectively and enjoyed decent returns. The trajectory of his international career soared upwards as well and he’d become South Africa’s first choice spinner in red-ball cricket while also always being in the reckoning for the limited-overs formats. Maharaj registered his best figures in Test cricket, a startling 9-129, in the second Test of South Africa’s tour to Sri Lanka and became only the second left-arm spinner, after Rangana Herath, to claim 9 wickets in a Test innings.

Perhaps Maharaj’s greatest achievement came in 2021 when he became only the second South African to take a Test hat-trick. In the second Test of South Africa’s tour to the West Indies, Maharaj removed Keiron Powell, Jason Holder and Joshua da Silva off successive deliveries to script his place in history.

In a bizarre turn of events, Maharaj was named captain of South Africa for a T20 series in Sri Lanka despite not being capped in the format yet. Maharaj captained his team to victory on debut and even picked up a wicket off his very first delivery in T20I cricket. He went to be a part of South Africa’s squads for both the 2021 and 2022 T20 World Cups and was named in South Africa’s 15-man squad for the Cricket World Cup in 2023.