Mark Stoneman

Mark Stoneman grew up playing cricket with a plastic ball and bat, while watching his father partake in league cricket in North East of England. He always looked up to cricket as his preferred sport.

He played in the U-19 WC in 2006, but struggled to make an impact, accruing just 20 runs in four games.

Even though Stoneman crunched his maiden first-class ton in 2007 for Durham against Sussex, he found runs hard to come by on seaming tracks at the Riverside stadium. He compiled his second Championship hundred only in 2011 and averaged a shade under 25 during the initial part of his career.

However, he has scored over 1000 first-class runs over each of the last five Championship seasons. Michael di Venuto, his opening partner at Durham, is his mentor and it was Di Venuto as coach of Surrey who helped the County club sign Stoneman for the 2017 domestic season.

In 2017, Stoneman has composed 889 runs at an impressive average of 55.56 in 10 first-class matches. He has an open stance, generally looks to play through the on-side, with drives down the ground and the occasional cut shot. And uses the sweep against spinners to good effect. It can be illustrated by how he played a stream of sweep shots against his current team - Surrey - to counter Batty and compile a fine hand of 77 in May 2013.

The bulk of runs helped him get a national call up in 2017 for the series against Windies. He did manage to get his maiden fifty in his second Test and did enough to board the flight for the Ashes down under.

He started the tour with a fifty but then failed to convert the starts into anything substantial. Two fifties and a duck in the last innings of the tour meant Stoneman had failed to deliver as per expectations.

Root through persisted with the Newcastle lad but the big scores stayed away from him even on the tour to New Zealand. He did manage two fifties from 4 innings and that meant he got another chance for the series against Pakistan in mid 2018. A failure in the first Test saw him being dropped.

Written by Bharath Ramaraj and Kumar Abhisekh Das