Shikhar Dhawan Retires with Unmatched Records: A Legacy Yet to Be Broken
On Saturday, Shikhar Dhawan, the former opener for India, announced his decision to withdraw from all cricket-related activities effective immediately, calling it quits on his career.
Dhawan has had a great career wearing the India jersey, having started the ODI series against Australia in 2010 with a second-ball duck and gone on to create one of the team’s most potent opening partnerships with Rohit Sharma, as well as becoming the team’s man of the moment in ICC competitions.
Here are some of Dhawan’s career highlights, including the record he set on his Test debut that is still standing.
Test Cricket:
Dhawan became the fastest hitter to achieve a hundred runs in a Test match as he took 85 balls to do so. In 2013, he made 187 off just 174 balls in a match against Australia in Mohali. Dhawan continues to hold the record for the highest strike rate of any batsman during a century on Test debut at 107.47. His 187 is the highest score by an Indian batsman on his Test debut. at a 2013 Test match between India and Australia at Mohali, the left-handed opener and Murali Vijay shared a record-breaking stand of 289 for the first wicket. In his career-best 190 against Sri Lanka in 2017, he made 126 runs between lunch and tea in Galle, the greatest by an Indian batsman between lunch ad tea in Tests.
ODIs:
Among the eight batsmen to score 5000+ runs in one-day internationals, the 38-year-old averages above 40 and strikes at a strike rate exceeding 90. In Twenty-Four ODIs, he scored 1162 runs at an average of 50.52 in 2013, his greatest year ever in terms of run aggregate. That year, he played 25 innings and hit five hundreds and four fifties. In One-Day Internationals at The Oval, Dhawan is still the only Indian player to score three hundreds: against the West Indies in 2013, Sri Lanka in 2017, and Australia in 2019.
Indian Premier League (IPL):
In 221 innings, he hit 768 fours, which is the most by any batsman in Indian Premier League (IPL) history. His total of 6769 runs is second-highest in IPL history, only surpassed by Virat Kohli’s 8004 runs. Nine times in the IPL, Dhawan scored 400 or more runs in a season. His finest campaign was 2020–21, when he scored 618 runs in 17 innings at an average of 44.14, including two hundreds and four fifties. The most times in an IPL season, 400+ runs have been scored by Kohli (10).
ICC Champions Trophy:
Dhawan has the highest average of 77.88 among the seven batters with 600 runs or more in the ICC Champions Trophy. He joins Chris Gayle, Sourav Ganguly, and Herschelle Gibbs as the only four batters with three hundreds in the ICC Champions Trophy.
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