Mohammad Rizwan - Most T20I Runs in Calendar Year

During the lockdown last year, Mohammad Rizwan was handed over the national team captaincy for the first time ever and while he wasn’t really known for his great batting records prior to that, a lot started to change. He started scoring runs across all formats and in all tournaments, even i the T20 format where he wasn’t known to be a big hitter or someone who can score runs at a high strike rate.

However, that form stuck and 2021 has been brilliant for him, especially in the shortest format. When he took the field in the 1st T20I against Wet Indies recently, he was also coming off 3 fifties in his last 4 international outings. He was the highest T20I run scorer of the year and as he added a few more to his tally, he went down into the history books for scoring the most T20I runs in any calendar year so far.

When you think about T20I cricket, names like Rohit Sharma, Martin Guptill, Chris Gayle and others may strike you but it’s actually Mohammad Rizwan who has broken this record, scoring 752 in 14 innings (15 matches) so far in 2021. Let us remind you that this year is only a little over half done and he can very easily go on to become the first to scale the 1,000-run mark in the T20I format in a year as well.

It was his innings of 46 runs off 36 balls in the 2nd T20I against West Indies that allowed him to hit this new milestone, surpassing a standing record of Irish batsman Paul Stirling, who amassed 748 runs in 20 matches at a batting average of 41.55 in the year 2019. So far in 2021, Rizwan has an average of 94 and there’s still a few more he can get this calendar year.

Third on this list is Ireland’s Kevin O’Brien (729 runs) and Netherlands’ Maxwell O’Dowd (702 runs) while Shikhar Dhawan from India is fifth in the list with 689 runs. “Indeed, this is a moment of pride for me, as this wasn’t only my record, but it was for the nation as well, as it was a world record,” Rizwan said after reaching this milestone in international cricket.

Fast bowler and Pakistan teammate Shaheen Shah Afridi mentioned that Rizwan bhai is like Superman and we call him Superman, and it shows with the way he’s been scoring runs in 2021. The team in fact celebrated the achievement in the dressing room and you can take a look at the celebration video here: