Sikandar Raza — The T20 Career of Zimbabwe's All-Round Anchor

The word all-rounder gets used loosely in Twenty20, usually to describe a batter who can be trusted with two overs in an emergency. Raza is the other thing: a player picked for both disciplines, who would be worth a place for either on its own in most sides outside the top three or four nations.

With the bat he operates in the middle order, which in T20 means arriving somewhere between the seventh and the fourteenth over into a situation that is rarely simple. With the ball he bowls off-spin and is used through the middle overs — the phase where a captain most needs control and where a spinner who does not concede boundaries is genuinely valuable.

The combination matters more for Zimbabwe than an equivalent player would for a larger side. Because he covers a full bowling allocation and a top-order-quality batting slot, he effectively gives the selectors a free place in the XI. That is why he plays in almost every configuration of the team.

6 Club does not offer cricket betting, match odds, fantasy tips or tipping of any kind, and nothing on this page is a prediction of a result. This is a fan profile written for entertainment. Every figure is quoted as reported at the time of writing and should be treated as approximate — check ESPNcricinfo for the current number before you repeat it.

Raza was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved with his family to Zimbabwe as a teenager. He came into international cricket comparatively late by modern standards, which is part of what makes the length of his subsequent career notable — he has been a first-choice international for well over a decade, having started later than most.

He has captained Zimbabwe, which in a side with limited resources is a job that involves a good deal more than field placings. Zimbabwe's fixture list is thinner than that of the larger boards and its players spend more of the year outside international cricket than their counterparts do, which shapes careers in ways the numbers do not show.

The franchise-league circuit is the other half of the story. Raza has been a regular in leagues across several continents — competitions in the Caribbean, in Pakistan, in the Gulf, in Sri Lanka, in Bangladesh, in England's short-format competition and elsewhere. For a player from a board with fewer international fixtures, that circuit is not a supplement to a career. It largely is the career, and it is why he has faced elite bowling far more often than Zimbabwe's own schedule would suggest.

Raza has been named ICC Men's Player of the Month more than once, an award decided monthly by a voting panel and public vote, and he has featured in ICC teams of the year. He has also been among the small group of players to pass a hundred Twenty20 International appearances, which is a milestone reached by very few given how recently the format was introduced.

We are describing these by category rather than listing dates and figures, and that is deliberate. Award records and appearance counts are exactly the sort of detail that gets miscopied, and Raza is still adding to both. ESPNcricinfo carries the maintained list.

The wider recognition is less formal and probably more telling: he is one of the few players from outside the largest boards who is picked in franchise leagues on merit rather than as an overseas curiosity, year after year, by teams with no particular reason to be sentimental about it.

With the ball, watch the field rather than the delivery. An off-spinner bowling in the middle overs is playing a containment game, and the interesting decision is where the captain hides the boundary rider. A quiet over in that phase is a good over even when nothing appears to happen.

With the bat, watch the first three balls he faces. A middle-order batter walking in during a rebuild has to work out very quickly whether this is a repair job or an acceleration job, and the answer shows up immediately in shot selection.

And watch him in the field, which is where his experience is most visible. Senior players in under-resourced sides do a lot of quiet organising that never reaches a scorecard.

Everything on this page is descriptive and historical. There is no live score, no result, no prediction, no betting odds and no fantasy recommendation, and there never will be — 6 Club does not offer a cricket betting product and does not publish tips of any kind.

If you want Raza's current runs, wickets, strike rate, economy or cap count, ESPNcricinfo has them and updates them from the official scorecard. Anything quoted from memory, including by us, would be out of date. Treat every figure you read anywhere on a cricket blog as approximate until you have checked it at source.