Babar Azam enters record books with yet another ODI century

KARACHI: Pakistan’s flamboyant batsman, and probably the most dependent batsman of the current lot, Babar Azam has scored yet another century in ODIs, his seventh of the career, which came during the 33rd inning of his career on Monday.

Babar smashed six boundaries to score 101 off 133 deliveries to achieve several records simultaneously.

The 23-year old has now the most number of runs and centuries in his first 33 ODI innings.

With a crucial inning of 101, Azam has now scored 1659 runs in the first 33 innings of his ODI career, nine more than South African great Hashim Amla.

He is also now the quickest to seventh ODI ton by reaching it in 33 innings, next to him is Hashim Amla with seven tons in 41 ODI innings. Zaheer Abbas reached seven ODI centuries in 42 innings while Quinton de Kock reached his seventh ODI century in his 50th innings.

His current batting average 57.20 is second best among all the batsmen who have batted at least 30 innings in one-day-internationals. Only above him is Ryan ten Doeschate whose batting average is 67.00, mainly because of greater numbers of not-outs in his career.

The century on Monday was Babar’s fifth consecutive in UAE, which makes him the first ever batsman to score five consecutive tons in one country. He scored a hundred in his first ODI of the on-going five-match series against Sri Lanka. He also scored three back to back centuries against West Indies earlier in UAE. He surpassed South Africa’s AB de Villiers who scored four consecutive centuries in India between 2010 and 2011.