Stats: Players to score a century on debut in Twenty20 cricket

The 2019-20 Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy started off with some quite matches on the first two days of the tournament. Most of the matches turned out to be low scoring ones while few got washed out. Out of the 32 scheduled matches in the first two days, only one game witnessed a 200+ total. Talking about individual knocks, Shivam Bhambri of Chandigarh turned out to be the only centurion thus far.

Since the inclusion of new teams from the last season, numerous records were created and broken due to the difference in the quality of the emerging teams and established state sides. While it has been the new teams which have been on the receiving end, Shivam Bhambri changed the trend. The 24-year-old scored a hundred in Chandigarh’s maiden Twenty20 match on Friday against Himachal Pradesh who have been around for more than three decades.

Batting at No.3, Bhambri scored 106 from 57 deliveries with 11 fours and seven sixes. His knock helped the T20 debutant side finish on 167/5. Himachal, in reply, made 84/4 in 11.3 overs before the rain started pelting down. No more play was possible in the match and Chandigarh won the game by 9 runs on the VJD par. With this knock, Bhambri became only the 2nd Indian and overall the 7th player to score a century on Twenty20 debut.

Hyderabad’s Akshath Reddy scored an unbeaten 105 during a successful 182-run chase against Mumbai in 2010. Moin Khan was the first player with a T20 century on debut as he scored 112 in the 2005 Pakistan Domestic T20 Cup for Karachi Dolphins. Two notable mentions in this shortlist are Ravinderpal Singh of Canada and Leslie Dunbar of Serbia who also achieved this feat in 2019 but while playing T20I matches.

Ravinderpal scored 101 in the T20 CWC Americas Qualifier against the Cayman Islands. He did play a few 20-20 matches for Canada till the start of 2019 but none of those games had official T20 status. With that knock, Ravinderpal also became the first player to score a century on T20I debut. Leslie Dunbar also scored T20I century on debut which was incidentally his maiden Twenty20 game like Ravinderpal. The highest score on T20 debut is however held by Pakistan’s Bilal Asif who scored 114 for Sialkot in 2015.

Players to score a century on debut in T20 cricket:

(Stats as on November 10, 2019)