Rizwan crosses milestone of 1,000 T20 runs this year

Karachi: Pakistan cricket team’s wicket-keeper batsman Mohammad Rizwan on Saturday added another feather to his cap when he completed 1000 T20 runs in the calendar year 2021.

Rizwan reached this milestone during the PSL6 match between Multan Sultans and Islamabad United in Abu Dhabi, his 20th T20 match of the year.

The 29-year-old batsman has scored 9 half-centuries and a century and has scored with an average of 76.92 in the year 2021 to become the first cricketer to accumulate four-figure runs in the shortest format in 2021.

He is, overall, the 7th Pakistani batsman to score a thousand (or more) runs in a calendar year after Shoaib Malik, Babar Azam, Imran Nazir, Umar Akmal, Ahmed Shahzad and Mohammad Hafeez.

Veteran Shoaib Malik has done this feat four times in his career. In 2016, Malik scored 1242 runs. In 2020 and 2014, he scored 1030 apiece while in 2019 the former Pakistan captain had scored 1010 runs.

Babar Azam, the current captain of the Pakistan Cricket team, had scored 1607 runs in the year 2019 while last year he had accumulated 1242 runs.

In 2020, Mohammad Hafeez had a total tally of 1005 runs. In 2016, Umar Akmal had scored 1386 runs. Ahmed Shahzad had scored 1138 runs in 2012 while in the same year Imran Nazir had a total of 1036 runs to his credit.