Race to 1000 T20Is: Lesser known stats and facts from the first 1000 Men's T20Is

The recent T20I between India and Bangladesh was the 1000th of the format in Men’s cricket. The format made its debut on February 17th in 2005 when New Zealand hosted Australia at the Eden Park in Auckland. It didn’t take much time for the ICC to adopt the 20-20 cricket as the first official T20 match was played in 2003, less than two years before the first T20I.

The ECB included Twenty20 Cup for the first time ever in their domestic season in 2003. Since the start of 2019, each and every 20-20 game between two nations has been recognized as official T20Is while many of the matches in the past years didn’t have even T20 status. The emergence of new teams saw the tally increase to 68 countries resulting in as many as 282 T20Is out of 1000 taking place in 2019.

All the lesser-known numbers recorded in the first 1000 T20I matches in Men’s cricket:

2 – Only two batsmen have got out in the Men’s T20I cricket till date without the involvement of a bowler or fielder. England’s Jason Roy was dismissed obstructing the field during the 2017 Taunton T20I against South Africa while Hassan Rasheed of Maldives got out in similar fashion against Qatar in January this year.

2 – Aaron Finch’s two T20I centuries are the top two highest individual scores in the T20I format. He scored 156 against Australia in 2013 while starting as non-striker while the record 172 last year against Zimbabwe came when he took the first strike. Thus, he held the record for highest score at two different positions in T20Is; the only such player in Men’s T20I cricket.

2/2 – Australia’s Michael Kasprowicz and New Zealand’s Lockie Ferguson are the players who have claimed wickets with their first two legitimate deliveries in T20I cricket.

Virat Kohli has a rare feat of taking a wicket before bowling a legitimate ball in this format. The current Indian captain had Kevin Pietersen stumped off a wide in 2011 when he came to bowl his first over in T20Is. Thus, Kohli got a wicket off the 0th ball in T20I cricket and is the other such player to do so.

3 – Number of players to have scored a century on T20I debut; all three recorded in the last 149 T20Is since August 2019. Ravinderpal Singh of Canada scored 101 against the Cayman Islands to break the record for the highest individual score on T20I debut. Ricky Ponting owned this record after scoring 98* against New Zealand in the first-ever T20 International in 2005 which stood for 850 more matches.

Two days after Ravinderpal’s effort, Namibia’s JP Kotze scored an unbeaten 101 against Botswana. Earlier in October, Serbia’s Leslie Dunbar went past both with an unbeaten 104 against Bulgaria on his debut. He also became only the 4th keeper-batsman to score a T20I ton.

8 – Namibia has won all the eight matches whenever they batted first in the T20I cricket. They also won each of their first seven T20I matches making them the first such side in Men’s cricket.

10+ – Afghanistan is the only team to have won 10 or more consecutive matches in Men’s cricket in the shortest format. The Afghan team won 11 in a row during 2016-2017 and bettered their own streak with 12 successive wins between 2018 and 2019.

11-0 – Pakistan’s win-loss record in the T20I format against Zimbabwe. Pakistan is the only team to win more than eight matches against an opponent without losing a game.

26.13 – Babar Azam has scored 26.13% of the runs aggregated by Pakistan in the 34 T20Is he has played. This is the highest % of team’s runs scored by any player in the shortest format (Min: 25 T20Is played).

Babar has amassed 1349 runs while the Pakistan team scored a total of 5162 runs including extra runs during the 34 T20Is Babar featured in.

28.62 – Rashid Khan holds the subsequent record in the bowling – the highest percentage of the team’s wickets taken by a player. Rashid has claimed 81 wickets in just 42 T20Is he has played for Afghanistan (41) & World XI (1). This accounts for 28.62% of wickets his teams have picked (Team wickets – 283) in the matches he played.

47 – Both MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma have appeared in at least one T20 International on 47 different venues. No other player has featured in more than 40 different grounds in the Men’s T20I cricket.

59y 181d – Osman Goker of Turkey made his T20I debut in August this year against Romania during the Romania Cup. He was 59 years and 181 days old on that day as he was born way back in 1960; which makes him the oldest also the earliest born T20I cricketer in Men’s cricket.

Cengiz Akyüz (57y 89d) and Serdar Kansoy (57y 56d), who also made debuts in the same tournament for Turkey are the only other players in the format born before 1965 (Born in 1962). All the three players born were at the time of only one format’s existence as the first-ever List A match was played in May 1963.

(Stats as on November 3, 2019: No.1 to No.1000 T20Is in Men’s cricket)