Harneet Sahni ’24
Contributor
When talking about cricket, the first thing that comes to mind are the images of several record-breaking batsmen from previous decades. Don Bradman, Shane Warne, Sachin Tendulkar, Imran Khan, Brian Lara, and several other exceptional players have records that are unbeaten to date.
Will these records ever be broken? Is there any batsman who can go beyond these elite players? Yes.
Various talents from across the world have exhibited the hidden dexterity of numerous players during the recent T20 ICC World Cup (T20I). One of the top batsmen throughout the tournament was India’s newly recruited Surykumar Yadav, nicknamed SKY.
Achieving a rating of 890, he was ranked at the top of the International Cricket Council (ICC) leaderboard just above Pakistan’s Mohammad Rizwan with an 836 rating. After T20I, SKY cemented his position at the top after his stupendous batting against New Zealand in the second T20I, when he scored a whopping 111 runs off simply 51 balls. Due to his tremendous batting performance, the team had an extremely comfortable 65-run victory.
Suryakumar Yadav was not only the best performer during the tournament, but he also set several records. First, he was the second batsman to hit two centuries in a calendar year in 2022 T20I. Second, he had the second most 50+ scores in the World Cup this year. Last, he is the first non-opening batsman to have scored more than 1000 T20I runs in a year.
These records positioned him as a prodigiously successful batsman throughout the 2022 T20I Wprld Cup. Suryakumar Yadav is currently the number one T20I ranked batsman in the world. SKY is in his prime, and this was seen at the T20I, where he demonstrated a miraculous gameplay.
In T20I cricket, he has played over 40 innings so far and has scored approximately 1400 runs with an average of over 44.0 and a strike rate close to a whopping 180.
He is playing phenomenally right now, although there are several other players like Chris Gayle, AB de Villiers, and Sachin Tendulkar who have records that are still unbeaten today. SKY cannot be considered as the best player of all time since it will take him a while to reach the level of these legends; however, he does remain the best batsman today.
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