Indian batsmen Smriti Mandhana and Suryakumar Yadav were announced on Thursday as nominees for the men’s and women’s T20 Cricketer of the Year awards, respectively, in recognition of their achievements in 2022.
In the men’s category, Suryakumar has been nominated alongside England’s Sam Curran, who won the T20 World Cup, Pakistan’s Mohammad Rizwan, and Zimbabwe’s Sikandar Raza, a batting all-rounder.
In the women’s division, Pakistan’s Nida Dar, a bowling all-rounder, New Zealand’s Sophie Devine, and Australia’s Tahlia Mcgrath will challenge Mandhana.
In the game’s shortest format, Suryakumar had an incredible 2022, becoming only the second batter to score more than 1000 runs in a single year.
At an absurd strike rate of 187.43, he scored 1164 runs to finish the year as the most run-getter. His total of 68 sixes in T20 cricket over the course of a calendar year is by a significant margin the most by any player in the format in a single year.
His average, which was in the mid-40s, shows how consistent Suryakumar was in the format. With two hundred and nine half-hundred years in the year, Yadav was the champion men’s T20 player.
He scored three fifties in six innings at the T20 World Cup in Australia, batting at a strike rate of 189.68 and averaging nearly 60 runs per innings.
After the tournament, he continued his stellar year by scoring his second hundred in T20 matches in the year in the bilateral series in New Zealand.
Suryakumar also rose to the top of the men’s T20 batter rankings that year, scoring a career-high 890 rating points.
Once more last year’s ICC ladies’ T20 Cricketer of the Year, Mandhana was an image of consistency in the most limited design.
Mandhana hitting the fastest fifty
Mandhana had a good year this year, hitting the fastest fifty by an Indian woman off just 23 balls to surpass the 2500-run mark in T20s.
She had an impact on the Commonwealth Games, the Twenty20 Asia Cup, and an unforgettable five-match home series against Australia toward the end of a successful year.
In the second Twenty20 match of the bilateral series against Australia in December, Mandhana’s most exciting innings of 2022 occurred.
Mandhana scored a 49-ball 79 to chase Australia’s 187/1 at the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai, which had the highest attendance for a women’s cricket match in India.
She scored the most runs for India in the match, winning it until the very end to set up a super over match after India tied the score at 187/5.
India batted first in the super over and scored a respectable 20/1, out of which Mandhana scored 13 off the final three balls (4, 6, 3).
This was a good total for India, who held Australia to 16/1 and secured a memorable victory in front of a raucous crowd.