Aiden Markram, the opener who won Lord’s and is still asked to do it again

Aiden Markram

Photo: Michael Sherman / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 4, 1994 Centurion
Occupation	Cricketer
Awards	ICC World Test Championship winner · ICC World Test Championship final Player of the Match · ICC Men's Player of the Month · ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup winner as captain · ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup Player of the Tournament · SA20 champion as captain · ICC T20I Team of the Year

South African cricket has been waiting for a particular Aiden Markram since he was a teenager: the composed leader with the classical cover drive, the player Graeme Smith once singled out as a future captain of the national side. The Markram who has actually turned up is harder to pin down. He can look untouchable for a session and be gone the next over. He has stood on the losing side of enough knockout games to know the routine by heart. Then came one afternoon at Lord’s, against Australia, when he carried his country over that line, and the argument about South Africa changed. The argument about Markram himself did not end there.

He grew up in Centurion, on the edge of Pretoria, and moved to Pretoria Boys High School for its sporting tradition. The first proof that the talk had substance came in Dubai, when he captained South Africa to the junior World Cup title and was named player of the tournament. One of his fast bowlers was Kagiso Rabada. He was the first South African captain to win a cricket World Cup, even if it was an age-group one.

That ICC Under-19 World Cup title arrived in early 2014, months before his 20th birthday in October, and it rested on 370 runs at an average of 123.33. The senior game opened quickly. He made his first-class debut for Northerns in October 2014, scored heavily for Titans and was Cricket South Africa’s domestic newcomer of the year in 2017. That September he made 97 on Test debut against Bangladesh, followed it with 143 in his second match, and by December he was the first South African to score two centuries in his first three Tests. In February 2018, at 23, he stood in for the injured Faf du Plessis as one-day captain against India, the second-youngest man to lead South Africa in the format after Smith himself. A few weeks later he made 152 against Australia at the Wanderers, which is still his highest Test score.

The rise was too smooth to last, and the way it broke says a good deal about him. On turning pitches his technique looked brittle: he averaged around 10 in Sri Lanka in 2018, and in India the following year he made a pair in Pune, trapped lbw second ball in one innings and given out lbw in the other without asking for a review, although replays showed the ball would have missed. Furious with himself, he lashed out at a solid object, fractured his right wrist and missed the final Test in Ranchi. He did not dress it up. “Emotions run high and sometimes the frustration gets the better of you,” he said, calling his own behaviour unacceptable and no excuse. For a player marketed as the calm heir to Smith, it was an awkward reveal: the composure was real, and so was the pressure he piled on himself.

The rebuild was gradual. In Pakistan in early 2021 he made his first Test hundred in more than two and a half years and finished as the series’ leading run-scorer, even as South Africa lost. White-ball cricket gave him a second identity. At the 2023 ODI World Cup he reached a century against Sri Lanka in 49 balls, briefly the fastest in the tournament’s history until Glenn Maxwell went quicker. In the new SA20 league he captained Sunrisers Eastern Cape to the title in each of its first two seasons. The IPL was less kind. Sunrisers Hyderabad made him captain in 2023, finished last, and gave the job to Pat Cummins the following year.

South Africa named him T20 International captain in March 2023, and in 2024 he led them to their first men’s T20 World Cup final, which they lost to India. He had a quiet tournament with the bat, and he later said he had felt helpless after getting out.

That feeling was what he took to Lord’s for the World Test Championship final in June 2025. He was out for nought to Mitchell Starc in the first innings and had already removed Steve Smith with his off-spin when South Africa set off after 282 to win. He batted 383 minutes for 136 from 207 balls, added 147 with a limping Temba Bavuma, and fell with six runs still needed. South Africa won by five wickets, their first senior ICC trophy since 1998, and Markram was player of the match. “All the questions that have been asked in the past have fortunately now been answered,” he said, adding that it would be great never to hear the word chokers again. Trying to explain the innings afterwards, he was strangely unsentimental: “I never really felt ‘in’.”

The months after Lord’s showed the range. In Guwahati in November 2025 he took nine catches in a Test, a record for any fielder who is not a wicketkeeper, as South Africa beat India by 408 runs and won a Test series in India for the first time in 25 years. In December he made a one-day century against India and was again player of the match.

The 2026 T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka brought back the old pattern. Markram led from the top of the order, with 86 not out against New Zealand and 82 not out against West Indies, and South Africa were unbeaten until the semi-final at Eden Gardens, where New Zealand beat them by nine wickets. He called it an unfortunate evening and admitted that 169 for eight had simply not been enough. The franchise year was thinner. In the IPL with Lucknow Super Giants he made 231 runs without a fifty as the team finished last, and in the SA20 his new side, Durban’s Super Giants, finished fifth despite his 108 from 58 balls in their final league game.

Away from the field he keeps a low profile. In July 2023 he married Nicole O’Connor, his partner for more than a decade.

He turned 32 at the start of this month, just ahead of a home Test series against Australia. In the defeat in Durban he batted 237 balls for 75 while the rest of the order folded around him, and at Gqeberha he was bowled by Scott Boland for 11 on a rain-wrecked first morning, with South Africa already 1-0 down. A third Test is still to come, and beyond it the 2027 ODI World Cup, played partly on home soil. Lord’s settled whether South Africa could win the big one. What Markram still has to show, as captain and as opener, is that the innings he played there was the rule and not the exception.

Tags: sports, athletes, cricketers, Aiden Markram, Temba Bavuma, ICC World Test Championship, South Africa national cricket team