Stevie Eskinazi has dyed his hair peroxide blond, and no wonder. He has been ignored by the Hundred throughout its first two editions and with the 2023 draft taking place on Thursday evening, he will do just about anything to get himself noticed.
Across the last three seasons, nobody has scored as many runs in the Vitality Blast, the counties' T20 competition, as Eskinazi. He has been playing for - and last season, captaining - the second-worst team in the country, Middlesex, but has churned out runs with remarkable consistency while scoring at a strike rate of 147.
Yet in the Hundred, England's new, premier short-form tournament which is played in the height of summer, he has been unwanted. In the competition's first draft, back in 2019, that was understandable: he was relatively new to white-ball cricket, and had never managed more than 57 in a T20 innings.
He seemed a safe bet for selection as a 'wildcard' or a replacement player after taking his strike rate to new heights, past 150,
in the 2022 Blast, but the phone call he hoped for never came. In the 50-over Royal London Cup, which runs parallel to the Hundred, he hit 146, 182 and 135 in three consecutive innings, then watched on with incredulity as batters with a handful of professional T20 appearances won replacement deals ahead of him.