Shubman Gill Breaks Babar Azam's Long-standing Batting Record in ODIs

India went out to find answers to a few questions in the second ODI against West Indies in Barbados on Saturday after benching the likes of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. But the team stuttered against the Windies attack and lost the game by 6 wickets. The only positive that came out of the game was the 90-run stand between Shubman Gill and Ishan Kishan for the opening wicket. The latter scored a run-a-ball 55 while his partner got 34 runs which took him past the long-standing record of Pakistan captain Babar Azam in ODIs

Those 34 runs helped Shubman surpass Babar in the list of batters with the most runs after 26 innings in the 50-over format. Babar amassed 1322 runs after the first 26 ODI innings. On the other hand, Gill edged past him with 1352 runs. England’s Jonathan Trott tops the list with 1303 runs, followed by Pakistan’s Fakhar Zaman (1275 runs) and South Africa’s Rassie van der Dussen (1267 runs).

India put in a sorry performance with the bat, going from 90/0 to 181 all-out in 40.2 overs.

Kishan and Shubman raised 90 runs but the disaster struck India just before the first rain interruption midway through their innings when the visitors lost two wickets off successive deliveries, slumping to 113/5 in the 25th over from 95/2 in the 18th over.

Axar Patel, sent to bat at no. 4, failed too as he managed 1 run in 8 balls. Stand-in skipper Hardik Pandya (7), tried to pull a bouncer around shoulder height from Jayden Seales but got it straight to Brandon King at midwicket. Pandya was the fourth batter to get out in the last ball of the 24th over.

Sanju Samson (9) got out off the first delivery of the 25th over as he edged leg spinner Yannic Cariah to King in the slips, getting squared up as he shaped up to hit it square and the ball spun and bounced and took the edge.

In reply to India’s 181, Kyle Mayers was off the blocks quickly, driving and flicking India’s new-ball pair of Hardik Pandya and Mukesh Kumar before Brandon King joined in, going past 1000 ODI runs with consecutive boundaries off Umran Malik.

Later, Hope brought up his fifty in 70 balls, also taking his team past the 150-run mark in the process. Despite not exactly dealing in boundaries until the very end, the pair took control of the chase and made sure West Indies scaled the target comfortably.

(With Agency Inputs)