🇮🇳 Ravindra Jadeja

His mother Lata, who worked as a nurse at GG Hospital in Jamnagar, died in a road accident in 2005 when Jadeja was sixteen and trialling for India's Under-19 side. He has said, in his rare and short interviews, that the death was the line that divided his life into two parts. The first part: a young left-arm spinner from a small Gujarat town. The second part: a man who refused to fail in cricket because failing would have made his mother's death pointless.

He played in the Under-19 World Cup in 2006 in Sri Lanka, and again as captain in 2008 in Malaysia, where India won the tournament under his command. He made his Ranji debut for Saurashtra in 2006 and within two seasons was averaging in the forties with the bat and bowling more than 700 overs a season. The IPL noticed: Rajasthan Royals signed him for the 2008 inaugural season and renamed him 'Sir Jadeja' as a tongue-in-cheek nickname that the country eventually adopted without the irony.

His India debut came in February 2009 in an ODI against Sri Lanka at Dambulla. The Test debut, peculiarly, took three more years — he was a white-ball specialist for the first four years of his international career — until December 2012, when MS Dhoni asked him to play at Nagpur against England. He scored 12 and 18 with the bat, took five wickets, and was never dropped from the side again. He has played, by 2026, eighty-plus Tests and is one of a handful of all-rounders in Test history with 3,000 runs and 300 wickets.

He is, by any reading of the numbers, the most successful Indian all-rounder in Test history. His bowling average sits below 25, his batting average above 35 — figures that almost mathematically cannot co-exist in modern cricket. He has scored four Test hundreds — including 175* at Rajkot in February 2024 against England — and produced match-winning spells from Galle to Birmingham. He was named ICC Player of the Match in pivotal Tests across the 2021–24 World Test Championship cycles.

White-ball cricket gave him a different curve. He was, for a stretch in the mid-2010s, India's primary holding bowler in ODIs and a finisher in T20Is, and he reinvented himself in 2022 and 2023 as a powerplay-and-death enforcer for Chennai Super Kings. He bowled the last over of the 2023 IPL final in Ahmedabad against Gujarat Titans, was hit early, and then hit the boundary that won Chennai a fifth IPL title in front of MS Dhoni — his most famous IPL moment.

He won the 2024 T20 World Cup in the Caribbean. He retired from T20Is the same evening with a brief social-media post. He is married to Riva Solanki, a Rajkot graduate; they have a daughter, Nidhyana, born in 2017. He is a horseman, owns a stud farm in Saurashtra, and rides at every available opportunity. He still salutes the crowd with his bat after every fifty.

On the field he is, by some distance, the best fielder India has produced — a deep-square specialist who has run out batters from the boundary with a flat right-arm throw that has been timed at over 130 kilometres an hour. He has held more than two hundred international catches and is the only Indian fielder with a hundred international run-outs to his name. He has, in essence, been three players in one shirt for fifteen years: a batter who can score a Test double-hundred, a bowler who can take five-fors on a fifth-day pitch in Brisbane or a turning track in Indore, and the fielder every captain wants where the ball is most likely to go.

He has, in interviews, refused to discuss farewells. He has said only that the salute is for his mother, and that the sword in the air is for everyone in his village who told him he would not amount to anything. He is, in 2026, still the first name on India's Test team sheet, still the man Rohit Sharma turns to in the 35th over, and still, after every milestone, the cricketer who looks up at the sky before he looks at the dressing room.