Ryan Burl liked playing squash when he was at school, but his love of cricket - specifically, the team game's camaraderie - made him want to be an international cricketer. A left-hand lower-middle-order batter and occasional legspinner, Burl broke into the Zimbabwe side in 2017, and has also played in the BPL and Afghanistan's Shpageeza Cricket League.

Sports-mad Burl studied at Peterhouse Boys School outside of Harare, which has produced England internationals Gary Ballance and the Currans, Sam and Tom; Italian rugby star Sebastian Negri; and Olympic rower Peter Purcell-Gilpin. Burl made his Zimbabwe U-17 and U-19 debuts within a month of each other in 2010-11, and his first-class debut, for Mashonaland Eagles, in 2014; in his second match of the Logan Cup that season, he made 92 and 66.

A century and two fifties against Afghanistan A in January 2017 paved the way for his ODI debut the following month, against the senior Afghanistan side. By the end of that year, he would also make his Test debut against South Africa.

The following year there came another batting high in the Logan Cup: 134 and 72 not out in a match against Mashonaland Eagles, which capped a run that started in April that year, during which he produced six scores of over 50 in five games, two of them hundreds. In mid-2019, Burl's batting in international white-ball cricket seemed to kick into a higher, more consistent, gear. He hit a 28-ball 54 in a T20I series-winning effort against Bangladesh in 2022. A month later, Burl, a part-time legspinner, starred in Zimbabwe's first win in any format in Australia, taking 5 for 10 in three overs in an ODI in Townsville.