Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan lives to chase records, and in his team’s final Super-12 match of the tournament, he achieved another personal milestone. A perfect wrong’un deceived Martin Guptill and dispersed his stumps to gain Rashid his 400th scalp in T20 cricket.
The Afghanistan team depends hugely on Rashid for providing them with regular breakthroughs from time to time. That is what the 23-year-old spinner did in the ninth over of the Kiwi innings. However, his team couldn’t win the match, as a result of which, both Afghanistan and India are now out of the tournament. New Zealand will join the likes of Pakistan from Group 2 in the semi-finals stage.
Rashid took just 289 matches to achieve this feat. While Dwayne Bravo, who was the first bowler to achieve it, had to play 364 matches to reach there. The Trinidadian, who recently announced his injury, has a total of 553 wickets to his name from 512 T20 matches. The next name on the list is Imran Tahir; he took 320 matches to reach the feat, while the third name on the list is Sunil Narine, another West Indian.
Rashid has a knack for always being in the midst of records. He has the record of most T20 wickets in a calendar year (96). Earlier in this tournament, Rashid also became the fastest bowler to take 100 T20 international wickets. He is only the fourth bowler after Southee, Shakib Al Hasan, and Malinga to achieve the 100 wicket milestone. Rashid took his 100th wicket in 53 matches, while it took Malinga (the previous record-holder) a total of 76 games.