🇮🇳 KL Rahul

He grew up in Mangalore on the Karnataka coast, the son of K. N. Lokesh, a civil engineering professor at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, and Rajeshwari, a college lecturer. He was named after Sunil Gavaskar's son Rohan, but the family called him Lokesh, and the cricketing world later compressed him to KL. He played first for Mangalore United, then for Karnataka Under-19s, then was selected for the 2010 Under-19 World Cup squad alongside a teenager from Delhi named Jaydev Unadkat and an unknown Mumbaikar called Mayank Agarwal.

His first-class career began in 2010 and ran on quietly for four years before the country noticed. In 2014–15 he scored 1,033 runs in the Ranji Trophy season, made his Test debut in Melbourne in December 2014, and was dropped after one match. Recalled for Sydney a fortnight later, he scored 110 — a hundred on debut in Australia at twenty-two, a feat managed by exactly five Indians before him. The pattern of his career was already visible: a slow start, a low point, a hundred that re-set the room.

Test cricket gave him the Centurion century of January 2018, the Lord's hundred of August 2021 (134 from 250 balls, India's first innings of the series), and the Centurion hundred again in December 2023. White-ball cricket gave him the 110* against Sri Lanka in August 2017 — his first ODI hundred — and the famous 132 against the West Indies at Visakhapatnam in 2018. The argument, always, was tempo. He could score fifties at any speed. He could also bat 60 deliveries for 32. Critics called him selective. Coaches called him careful. Both, on different days, were right.

The IPL was where the doubts hardened and then dissolved. He captained Punjab Kings from 2020 to 2021 with three consecutive seasons of 600-plus runs at a strike rate that the rest of his white-ball cricket rarely matched — including 132* off 69 against RCB in 2020 and an Orange Cap year. In 2022 he became the inaugural captain of Lucknow Super Giants, leading them to the playoffs in their debut season and again in 2023 before injuries and form pulled him back to a senior-batter role under new captaincy in 2024 and 2025.

He has played, by 2026, in fifteen positions across formats — opener, three, four, five, wicketkeeper-finisher, even at six in white-ball internationals — and has captained India in seven Tests and twelve ODIs across stand-in stints. The 2023 ODI World Cup, in which Rohit Sharma's batters fell apart in the middle order against South Africa and New Zealand, became the season his selflessness was finally counted as a leadership trait rather than a personality flaw. He kept to a young Mohammed Shami spell at the death, batted with the tail, and finished the tournament with 452 runs at a strike rate of 90 — the second-best Indian in the side after Virat Kohli.

He married the actor Athiya Shetty — daughter of Suniel Shetty — in January 2023 at Khandala. Their daughter Evaarah was born in October 2024, while he was in Bengaluru between Tests. He has spoken, in carefully phrased interviews, about the noise — the social-media hostility that follows every slow innings, the on-and-off place in the side, the tabloid years before the marriage. He has also said, simply, that he wants to bat for India in 2027 and 2031. The cover drive, for now, has stopped looking like an apology.

His batting has the quietest backlift of any modern Indian opener — almost no flourish, the bat picked up to second slip and brought down through the line — and the result, when timed, is a cover drive that travels along the carpet without sound. Sunil Gavaskar, on commentary, has called it 'the most aesthetically perfect cover drive in this generation of Indian cricket'. The aesthetic has been, perhaps, his trap: he has been criticised for batting too prettily for his strike rate. His response, in 2024, has been to score 80s and 90s at run-a-ball and to refuse the public question of tempo altogether.