Players not quite looking like themselves

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"You look nothing like your picture" - a statement used long before people mastered the art of chiaroscuro to upload misleading profile photos on Facebook. We decided to use it as the theme of this month's photo feature: images in which cricketers look different from how they do in the popular collective memory; when you need to take a second look just to make sure it's them. (If you do recognise them on first glance, that's because you're smarter than the average Joe.)

In the photo above, 23-year-old Damien Martyn, a batting artist who was his own man for much of his career, looks like a well-fed school prefect.

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A 15-year-old Alastair Cook (yet to get his well-defined cheekbones and jawline), who had been a choir boy previously, seen during the U-15 World Cricket Challenge in 2000.

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Fifteen-year-old Azhar Ali is caught and bowled by 14-year-old Xavier Marshall (while 15-year-old Denesh Ramdin stands behind the wicket) at the World Challenge final, which West Indies won by two wickets, at Lord's.

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Virat Kohli before (at 19) and after (at 27) his fitness transformation.

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A 22-year-old Dennis Lillee, sans mo', during the 1972 Ashes. On the tour, Lillee, Rod Marsh, Paul Sheahan, Greg Chappell and Ross Edwards decided to have a moustache-growing competition. "It really boiled down to a two-way contest between Marsh and Lillee, with Sheahan a distant third," remembers Ian Chappell, who took a shot at growing his own in the Caribbean in '73. "Dennis and Rod have continued with theirs, but the others either gave it away during or after that tour."

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Richard Hadlee at 21, with big hair and no mo'.

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Graham Gooch, circa 1975, with a hairstyle that really needs to come back.

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Richie Benaud, at 19, looking more dashing than stately.

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Jason Krejza (front row, kneeling, first from left) and Daniel Christian (back row, fifth from left) as part of the 2001-02 New South Wales U-19 team.

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Even at seven months old, Stuart Broad (front, left) could muster up a look that would have umpires shifting from one foot to another.

While there are several players who started balding over the course of their careers, there are some we distinctly remember as totally bald.

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Like Syed Kirmani, seen here, in 1971, with what looks like a combover.

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And Darren Lehmann, in the early '90s, with a full head of hair.

Nishi Narayanan is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo

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