Rizwan named Wisden’s top T20 player in 2021

KARACHI: Pakistan’s wicketkeeper batsman Mohammad Rizwan has been named the Leading T20 Cricketer in the World in the 2022 edition of the Wisden Almanack.

Rizwan last year became the first cricketer in the history of T20 cricket to amass over 2,000 runs in a calendar year. He scored 2,036 runs in 45 innings at an average of 56.55 in 2021.

He also became the first to score 1,000 T20 international runs in a calendar year. His 2021 runs tally included 1,326 runs at an average of 73.66 in international cricket.

Rizwan was named among Widen Cricketers of the year during the preceding year as well.

While profiling Rizwan for Wisden, Alan Gardner wrote that Rizwan was batting as if blessed with foresight and recalled the video that went viral after Pakistan’s win in ICC T20 World Cup against India.

“Twenty20 batting is supposed to be a volatile, high-variance occupation: boom-boom or bust. Occasionally, a player produces a purple patch to rise above the hurly-burly. But no one has had a year of such sustained run-scoring as Pakistan’s Mohammad Rizwan.

“he was batting as if blessed with foresight. And in a sense, he was. After starring in Pakistan’s ten-wicket demolition of India at the T20 World Cup, his clarity of purpose was summed up by a viral video from the ICC that spliced his pre-game routine of visualisation alongside the boundaries he struck during his 55-ball 79,” he wrote.

He also highlighted how remarkable the year was for Mohammad Rizwan. “In all T20 cricket, he made 2,036 at 56. No one — not Chris Gayle, not Virat Kohli, not Rizwan’s opening partner, Babar Azam, who last year scored 1,779 himself — had ever got near 2,000,” Alan Gardner noted.