Samuel Thomas Fanning (born 20 October 2000) is a New Zealand-born Australian

cricketer Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

who plays first-class cricket for the Western Australia cricket team. He made his first-class debut against New South Wales in the 2022–23 Sheffield Shield. He has also represented the Australian under-19 team in both Test and

ODI cricket A One Day International (ODI) is a form of limited overs cricket, played between two teams with international status, in which each team faces a fixed number of overs, currently 50, with the game lasting up to 9 hours. The Cricket World Cu ...

Career

Fanning represented Australia at the

2020 Under-19 Cricket World Cup The 2020 ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup was an international limited-overs cricket tournament that was held in South Africa from 17 January to 9 February 2020. It was the thirteenth edition of the Under-19 Cricket World Cup, and the second to be ...

. In the quarter-final against India he top-scored for Australia with 75 runs, but received two demerit points from the ICC for elbowing Akash Singh during the match. He also faced criticism along with some of his teammates for inappropriate comments made on social media during the tournament that appeared to mock non-native English speakers, with a Cricket Australia statement labelling the comments as "having no place in society". Fanning plays for Perth in

Western Australian Premier Cricket WA Premier Cricket in Western Australia refers to the semi-professional cricket league played at a level below the first-class Western Warriors and other state teams. The competition is administered by the Western Australian Cricket Association ...

and had a breakout season in 2021–22, scoring more First Grade runs than any other batter, and scoring over 1000 runs for the season across all competitions by mid-January. His performance in grade cricket earned a call-up to his state side for the first match of the 2022–23 Sheffield Shield in which he scored a gritty 32 from 161 balls. Shortly after his first-class debut Fanning played two T20 matches for Western Australia against a touring Indian side as part of the Indian warm-ups for the

2022 T20 World Cup The 2022 ICC Men's T20 World Cup was the eighth ICC Men's T20 World Cup tournament. It was played in Australia from 16 October to 13 November 2022. Although originally scheduled to be held in 2020, in July 2020, the International Cricket Counci ...

. In the first of these matches Fanning gained attention for scoring a half-century after coming in with his team 4 wickets down for just 12 runs.

Pitch tampering

In March 2023, Fanning received a four-game ban from the WA Premier Cricket competition, with a further two matches suspended, after being caught on film digging his spikes into the protected area of the pitch during the WA Premier Cricket final in Perth between Perth CC and Bayswater-Morley CC. Furthermore, he will be ineligible for state selection early next season.

References

External links

* 2000 births Living people Australian cricketers New Zealand emigrants to Australia Western Australia cricketers Cricketers from Christchurch {{Australia-cricket-bio-2000s-stub