In the past few years in international cricket, if there is one team that has shown constant progress and only moved upwards, it is the Afghanistan national cricket team. The players and the team management have used the limited resources and the exceptional spin bowling talent of the nation in the right manner, and the results are there for everyone to see. In the recently concluded ICC Men’s ODI Cricket World Cup 2023, they put on their best ever performance, beating a lot of top-tier teams such as England and Pakistan.
A similar kind of performance is expected from them this year in the T20 World Cup. In the process of this tremendous growth, the Afghanistan team has also broken many records. One such record is scoring their highest ever team total in the history of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.
On October 25, 2021, in Sharjah, Afghanistan was playing the 17th match of the tournament against Scotland, where they elected to bat first. What followed was an incredible batting display from the Afghan batters, as they posted a total of 190 runs on the board, their highest ever in the tournament’s history.
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It all began with Hazratullah Zazai and Mohammad Shehzad’s explosive opening partnership, where the former scored 44 runs in 30 balls, whereas the latter scored 22 runs in just 15 balls. Rahmanullah Gurbaz came in at number three and played a decent inning of 46 runs on 37 balls.
But the real show started when Najibullah Zadran switched the gears on and batted like a beast against the Scotland bowlers. He scored a brilliant fifty (59 runs in 34 balls) and ended with a strike rate of 173 in the match. Mohammad Nabi’s 11 runs in four balls took the team’s total to 190/4 after 20 overs.
In response to this, Scotland were bowled out for just 60 runs, courtesy of a spin bowling masterclass from Mujeeb ur Rahman and Rashid Khan, both sharing nine wickets between them. Mujeeb was the player of the match for his sensational spell of 4-0-20-5, as Afghanistan won the match by 130 runs.
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