LONDON: Pakistan’s wicketkeeper-batter Mohammad Rizwan has been named the Leading T20 Cricketer in the World in the 2022 edition of the Wisden Almanack.
The 29-year-old wicketkeeper, last year, became the first-ever cricketer in the history of T20 cricket to amass over 2,000 runs in a calendar year. He scored 2,036 runs in 45 innings at an average of 56.55 in 2021.
Rizwan also became the first-ever player to score 1,000 T20 international runs in a calendar year. At an average of 73.66 in international cricket, he made 1,326 runs.
Before 2021, Mohammad Rizwan had scored 313 T20I runs in 26 matches.
In 2021 alone, he scored a staggering 1,326 runs at an average of 73.66, with one century and 12 half-centuries.
A stunning 12 months for Wisden’s Leading T20 Cricketer in the World ????#WisdenAwards pic.twitter.com/P1nH4KufS7
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) April 20, 2022
“Twenty20 batting is supposed to be a volatile, high-variance occupation: boom-boom or bust. Occasionally, a player produces a purple patch to rise above the hurly-burly. But no one has had a year of such sustained run-scoring as Pakistan’s Mohammad Rizwan,” Alen Gardner wrote while profiling Rizwan.
“Never mind seeing it well: he was batting as if blessed with foresight. And in a sense he was. After starring in Pakistan’s ten-wicket demolition of India at the T20 World Cup, his clarity of purpose was summed up by a viral video from the ICC that spliced his pre-game routine of visualization alongside the boundaries he struck during his 55-ball 79,” he added.
Gardner also emphasised how brilliant Rizwan’s numbers were and how he left behind the greats of T20 cricket.
“The bare numbers had a formidable heft. Rizwan peeled off 1,326 T20I runs at 73 – breaking the calendar record, set by Ireland’s Paul Stirling in 2019, by almost 600. In all T20 cricket, he made 2,036 at 56. No one – not Chris Gayle, not Virat Kohli, not Rizwan’s opening partner, Babar Azam, who last year scored 1,779 himself – had ever got near 2,000.”
It is worth mentioning that Rizwan in the previous year was named among Widen Cricketers of the year as well.
