Sherfane Rutherford

One of the world’s most promising T20 cricketers, Sherfane Rutherford could be a big star in the franchise circuit by the year 2025. The Global T20 Canada in 2018 was the tournament which saw the grand introduction of Sherfane Rutherford as he led the West Indies B team with the bat by scoring 230 runs in eight matches on the way to a runners-up finish. 

This performance saw Rutherford get contracts in the Caribbean Premier, Bangladesh Premier League, and even in the Indian Premier League. In his debut CPL season, Rutherford made 171 runs from eight matches. He followed this up with 180 runs from just six matches in the BPL for Sylhet Thunder. He also had a stunning campaign in the T10 League while representing Bengal Tigers. Rutherford scored 195 runs from eight T10 matches at a strike rate of 211.95.

Those impressive performances meant that he also got a West Indies senior team call-up for the T20I series in Bangladesh. After missing out on the first two matches, the southpaw eventually made his debut in the third T20I but couldn't score much at No.8 and scored just two runs off six balls. Post his debut, the youngster played a couple more T20Is where he just could not replicate potential into performance, resulting in Rutherford being dropped from the national team.

Rutherford has looked more at home in T20 cricket but one can’t rule him out for both ODIs and long-form cricket. He has produced 486 runs and 33 wickets in 17 first-class matches while the List-A statistics are bound to improve in the future.

In June 2019, the youngster was selected to play for the Edmonton Royals franchise team in the 2019 Global T20 Canada tournament. In November that year, he was picked by the Sylhet Thunder for 2019-20 of the Bangladesh Premier League. 

Although the youngster didn’t enjoy much on the field in any of these leagues. Rutherford has looked more comfortable at the top of the order but he has not had many opportunities to bat higher up the order so far. Even in the IPL, during the 2019 season, Delhi Capitals used him as a finisher, where he could only get a couple of overs utmost. Hence, the Guyanese failed to prove his right mettle. 

The following year, in July 2020, he was named in the Guyana Amazon Warriors squad for the 2020 Caribbean Premier League, where he again didn’t have as much success as he would have hoped. The southpaw played seven matches to score just a paltry 39 runs at 5.5.7. However, Rutherford is too good a talent to turn his failures into a jaw-dropping season. 

The major problem for the youngster has been his batting position. Now, a 23-year-old Rutherford would look to have an astonishing CPL 2021 for Guyana Amazon Warriors to fancy his chances to represent the West Indies in the forthcoming World T20.

(As of August 2021)