Suryakumar Yadav touches 'SKY-line', becomes India's highest T20I run-scorer in a calendar year

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Indian middle-order batter Suryakumar Yadav's current situation as India's best Twenty20 International (T20I) batter has been reaffirmed. He has become India's highest run-scorer in a single calendar year, scoring 732 runs, surpassing senior opener Shikhar Dhawan's 689 in 2018. Suryakumar, who lacerated one of his fairest T20I half-centuries against South Africa on a seaming track at the Greenfield International Stadium in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday, is just 24 runs short of conducting 1,000 T20I runs. This year, his strike rate is a whopping 180.29, while his career strike rate is 173.35 across 32 T20Is, having already hit 57 sixes and 88 fours.

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Coming out to bat at the fourth position in the opening T20I against the Proteas, with India struggling at 17/2 in the seventh over, Suryakumar struck a couple of sixes off the first three deliveries he faced to hand the innings a momentum change following a quiet start. He stayed unbeaten on 50 off 33 deliveries, with India scaling the target by eight wickets with more than three overs to spare.

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Suryakumar went past wicketkeeper-opener Mohammad Rizwan of Pakistan to register the most sixes in a T20I calendar year with a couple of sixes early in the innings against the South Africans. Rizwan held the record for his 42 sixes in 2021, with opener Martin Guptill of New Zealand also crashing 41 sixes in the same year.

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Suryakumar has already taken his sixes tally to 45 in 2022, a record in all T20Is, while three months of more T20Is could widen the gap with Rizwan. While Rizwan utilised 26 innings to flog 42 sixes, Suryakumar has busted the record by batting five times rarer. Suryakumar was up to the second spot in the latest ICC Men's T20I Player Rankings with 801 rating points after his half-century in the third and final T20I against Australia at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad last Sunday.

(With inputs from PTI)