🇮🇳 Rishabh Pant

He was born in Roorkee in 1997, the son of Rajendra Pant — who worked in a small business — and Saroj. The family was middle-class and unconnected to the cricket establishment. His father drove him from Roorkee to Delhi on weekends, sleeping in a Sikh gurudwara off the Yamuna because hotels were beyond budget, so that Pant could train at the Sonnet Cricket Club under the coach Tarak Sinha. Rajendra Pant died of a heart attack in 2017 while Rishabh was at the IPL. The boy played that night and scored a fifty.

His Under-19 career was the loudest of his generation. At the 2016 World Cup in Bangladesh he scored a quick-fire knock against Nepal that the highlight reels still play. In the IPL he was bought by Delhi Daredevils — later Capitals — in 2016 and stayed there for the rest of his career. His 128* off 63 against Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2018 was, at the time, the fastest IPL hundred by an Indian.

Test cricket arrived in August 2018 at Trent Bridge. His maiden Test hundred came in his second match, at the Oval, where he scored 114 off 146 against Anderson, Broad and Stokes. In Australia, on the 2018–19 tour, he made 159* at Sydney, then in January 2021 at the Gabba he chased down 328 with an 89 off 138 that finished, after Shubman Gill's 91, the most famous fourth-innings win of the modern Indian era. He was twenty-three.

Then came England 2022 — the rescheduled Edgbaston Test — where he scored 146 off 111 in the first innings, hitting an extraordinary six off James Anderson over deep midwicket that almost left the ground. He scored a second-innings fifty in the same Test. He was, by his twenty-fifth birthday, India's most destructive Test wicketkeeper since the position had been invented.

And then the highway. On 30 December 2022, returning from Delhi to Roorkee to surprise his mother for the New Year, his car hit a divider near Narsan border and burst into flames. He was airlifted to Max Hospital in Dehradun, then to Mumbai. He had a torn ACL, a torn MCL, a torn meniscus, ligament damage in his right ankle, a forehead laceration, and burns. He spent fifteen months in rehabilitation — much of it at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru — before he kept wicket again.

He returned in the IPL on 23 March 2024 against Punjab Kings at Mohali, kept wicket for sixteen overs, and scored 18 off 13. By May he was scoring fifties. He went to the T20 World Cup in the Caribbean in June 2024 and was India's leading run-scorer in the group stages, contributing crucial cameos en route to the trophy. He was named in the ICC T20 Team of the Tournament. The Test side recalled him in September 2024.

He is, in 2026, the captain of Delhi Capitals in the IPL, has scored Test fifties since his return, and remains the most expensive purchase in IPL history, having been bought by Lucknow Super Giants for a record sum at the November 2024 auction. He has spoken about the night of the crash exactly twice in long-form interviews and has otherwise refused. He has, however, said that he stopped feeling pain in his right knee somewhere in the third over of his IPL comeback, and that he has not felt it since.