Date of birth – 30 November 1984, Leicester
Nottinghamshire First-Class Debut – 3 July 2002 v West Indies A (Trent Bridge)
Samit Patel has served Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club with distinction for more than 20 years, making his debut as a teenager back in 2002.
Now a white-ball specialist, he has appeared for Notts in every season since the inception of the T20 competition in 2003, allowing him to tot up more appearances than anyone else in the domestic game.
Affectionately nicknamed the ‘Natural Born Thriller’, Patel has played more matches and taken more wickets than anyone else and only Alex Hales has also scored more than his 4,000 T20 runs for the club. Fittingly, his undefeated 64 in the final against Warwickshire helped Notts lift the Blast trophy for the first time in 2017.
His performances that year, which included back-to-back double hundreds in the county championship – the only Notts player to achieve the feat – saw him presented with a trio of prestigious awards as Nottinghamshire Player of the Year, the Professional Cricket Association’s Most Valuable Player and their Player of the Year.
The all-rounder has made a habit of producing when the pressure is on, particularly in front of the television cameras. Patel is the only player to have won man-of the-match awards in both a Lord’s one-day final and a T20 Blast final.
Twice a championship winner with his home county and twice a Lord’s one-day winner, the trophy cabinet is also bulging with medals from T20 championship successes all around the globe.
He has featured in Australia’s Big Bash, the Caribbean Premier League, the Pakistan Super League, plus other domestic competitions in the UAE, Bangladesh, South Africa, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. Nearer to home, the local legend was a member of the Trent Rockets team that won The Hundred in 2022.
Internationally, Patel was one of the first English players to complete the full set of England appearances, representing them in six Test Matches, 36 One-Day internationals and 18 T20 internationals.