The Hundred 2026
The six best players The Hundred didn't sign
Thirteen balls, nine minutes. That is how long Kamran Dhariwal took to reach fifty against Worcestershire in July, equalling the fastest half-century ever made in English domestic T20. He went on to 70 off 22 balls, with eight sixes. He was 21, seven weeks into his professional career, and two years into a medicine degree at Bristol.
Nobody in The Hundred called him. He is one of six cricketers the competition could have signed for 2026 without using any of its four overseas slots, listed here in the order our player ratings rank them.
| Player | Plays for | Runs above average (est.) | Age |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sam Hain | Warwickshire | +2.4 | 31 |
| Kamran Dhariwal | Gloucestershire | +1.8 | 21 |
| Harrison Ward | Sussex | +1.7 | 26 |
| James Anderson | Lancashire | +1.7 | 44 |
| Luke Hollman | Middlesex | +1.1 | 26 |
| Jake Ball | Somerset | +1.1 | 35 |
Sam Hain: an average of 39, and no bids
Warwickshire · batter · 31 years old
Over the last two seasons, in the Blast and in the SA20 with Paarl Royals, Hain has scored 788 runs at an average of 39.4, where batters in those two competitions average 23.6. He does not pay for that by scoring slowly, either: his strike rate is 141, against 139 for everyone else, and at the death it climbs to 180, against 156.
In this summer’s Blast alone he made 306 runs in ten innings at an average of 44. It is an unfashionable kind of value. Hain is not the batter who wins a game on his own in four overs. But he faces 28 balls for every time he is dismissed, while the batters around him last 17. A number four who stays in that much longer gives everyone below him the freedom to swing.
Trent Rockets kept Tim David, Tom Banton, Ben Duckett and Mitchell Santner over the winter. Hain had played six games for them in 2025, and this year nobody signed him at all.
Kamran Dhariwal: fifty in nine minutes
Gloucestershire · batter · 21 years old
In his first Blast season Dhariwal played 12 games and made 239 runs from just 142 balls. That is a strike rate of 168, when the Blast as a whole scored at 141. He also hit 18 sixes, one for every eight balls he faced.
The hardest thing to do in a T20 innings is to get moving from nothing, and Dhariwal was at his best in the middle overs, where that is hardest. He scored at a strike rate of 166 in the middle overs, against a competition average of 134, rising to 172 in the death overs.
The sample is tiny, though. Eleven innings and 142 balls is very little cricket to judge anyone on, and one 22-ball innings makes up a big share of his runs. Gloucestershire saw enough to give him a two-year contract in August. He goes back to Bristol this month for the third year of his medicine degree.
A Hundred side could have taken a punt on those eleven innings and looked clever by September. None of them did.
Harrison Ward: 15 sixes in 153 balls
Sussex · opener · 26 years old
Ward made 258 runs in nine Blast innings this summer at a strike rate of 168.6, when the competition average was 141. He was quicker still in the powerplay, where an opener earns his keep: 172, against 143 for everyone else.
His two-year record is more modest: 416 runs at a strike rate of 148.6, and an average of 20.8 where the same competitions average 23.7. When he gets going he tears into the bowling, but he does not tend to stay in for long.
Even so, a left-handed opener who scores at 168 is not something English cricket has lying around spare.
James Anderson: nobody could get him away
Lancashire · bowler · 44 years old
Anderson played five Blast games this summer, and batters could barely score off him. He went for 7.42 an over where the competition went for 8.75, and 46.5% of his deliveries were dots, against 33.5% across the Blast. With the new ball he conceded just 6.79 an over.
This is not a one-off. Over the last two seasons he has 28 wickets in 16 games, taking one every 12.9 balls, where the average Blast bowler needs 17.6. Of all the bowlers in the competition who have sent down at least 200 balls in the powerplay, only three have been harder to score off.
The same thing happened last year. Anderson went undrafted, took 20 wickets in the Blast at 7.85 an over, and Manchester Originals then picked him up in the wildcard draft. He played three games for them. This year the wildcard went to somebody else, and Anderson, who is also captaining Lancashire in the County Championship, was still bowling in September.
Expect a Hundred side to remember him in 2027, probably a fortnight too late.
Luke Hollman: the middle-overs brake
Middlesex · leg-spinner · 26 years old
Overs seven to fifteen are Hollman’s time. He bowled 210 balls there in this year’s Blast and went for 7.46 an over, where the competition average was 8.13. Across whole innings he conceded 7.93 an over against an average of 8.76, and took 11 wickets.
He is not a wicket-taker, and it would be silly to pretend he is. His 27 wickets over two seasons have come at one every 20 balls, slower than the Blast average of one every 17.5. Nor is he a bowler for the final overs: he went for 10.67 an over there this summer. His job is to take the middle of an innings and stop it running away.
That is exactly the job Adil Rashid was bought to do for £250,000, the most any bowler went for at the auction in March. Middlesex have Hollman under contract until 2028. At 26 he has never been in a Hundred squad.
Jake Ball: 20 wickets, at a price
Somerset · bowler · 35 years old
Ball took 20 wickets in 13 Blast games this summer, one every 11.8 balls, where the competition average was one every 17.6. Of everyone who bowled at least 150 balls, only five took their wickets more often. Somerset trusted him with the hardest overs, too: 86 of his 236 deliveries came from the 16th over onwards.
The downside is the runs. He went for 9.53 an over, when the Blast average was 8.74, and his last two seasons tell the same story: 28 wickets at nine an over. Pick Ball and you get a bowler who will take wickets but hand back some runs in the process.
He won the Blast with Somerset last year, taking 2 for 39 in the final, and his last Hundred game was for Welsh Fire in 2024. For a side whose problem is failing to bowl teams out, he is still the answer.
So who would you have taken?
Anderson with the new ball, Dhariwal on the strength of eleven innings, Hain at four, or Ward at the top of the order? Eighty-seven players were sold at the auction in March, and 22 of them went for the £31,000 minimum. Which of these six would you have spent that money on instead?