Liam Livingstone

The sense that Liam Livingstone is a domineering batting talent who will end up playing all three formats for England was strengthened by an excellent maiden Championship double-century for Lancashire against Warwickshire at Old Trafford in 2017. He had begun the season billed as the "belligerent face of England's next generation" after a successful England Lions tour of Sri Lanka, and England took an early look at him with two T20 appearances against South Africa before deciding that he needed more time to craft his game at county level. That double-hundred suggested his research was coming along just fine.

Crafting his game did not go well in 2018. He broke a thumb in the Roses match in July which did not help (bizarrely reappearing to bat with a short leg pad as protection) and failed to reach fifty in 10 Championship matches as Lancashire were relegated under his captaincy. He recovered in time for Finals Day in the T20 Blast where his hundred in 49 balls against Derbyshire had provided his greatest satisfaction in a summer he would want to forget.

He gave up the captaincy at the end of the season and over the next three years embarked on a globe-trotting T20 journey, ticking off the majority of the world's franchise leagues during English winters to expose himself to different conditions and roles. His form led to an ODI debut in early 2021 and a T20I recall exactly four years after his debut against Sri Lanka. The following month, he blitzed the fastest-ever T20I hundred by an Englishman, off 42 balls against Pakistan at Trent Bridge, then cleared the new stand at Headingley and embarked on a six-hitting rampage in the first season of the Hundred.

Livingstone, a hard-hitting batsman from Barrow in Cumbria, won a trophy in his first season in Lancashire colours when they triumphed at Edgbaston on Finals Day in the 2015 NatWest Blast. His satisfaction did not come without mishap, however, after he was glassed (and deemed an innocent party) in a late-night incident in an Ashford bar after the quarter-final win against Kent and needed around 20 stitches. A first-ball duck, bowled by Northants' Shahid Afridi, added to his misery in the final, but Lancashire were hopeful that, at the very least, they had a big hitter on their hands.

He had first attracted media attention as the season began by striking 350 in 138 balls for his club side Nantwich in a mismatch which saw them beat Caldy by 500 runs. It was held to be one of the largest individual scores in any officially-sanctioned limited-overs fixture.

He had moderate success in 2015-16 in Australian club cricket with Perth, but Lancashire's coach, Ashley Giles, gave the 22-year-old opportunities in all formats and was rewarded when he topped Lancashire's Championship batting averages, building on a maiden first-class hundred against Somerset in Taunton. A 21-ball fifty against Yorkshire equalled what at the time was Lancashire's quickest in Twenty20. England Lions' interest was quickened and two intelligently-compiled hundreds in Sri Lanka spoke of a batsman more adaptable than many had imagined as well as one who possessed useful attributes as either legspinner or offspinner as the situation demanded.
ESPNcricinfo staff