Photo: Collected
South Africa’s Lhuan-dre Pretorius has broken former West Indies star Chris Gayle’s record for the highest individual innings in T20 cricket, which had stood for more than a decade. He ran riot against the Knights in a CSA T20 Challenge match in Bloemfontein.
Opening the innings, the 20-year-old Titans batter played an incredible knock of an unbeaten 188 off 79 balls. In Friday’s match, Pretorius put on a display of boundaries, hitting 15 fours along with 13 sixes in an explosive batting effort.
Earlier, Gayle had scored an unbeaten 175 off 66 balls for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors in the 2013 IPL. Pretorius has now left behind the Caribbean legend who had been at the summit of this format until now. He began by hitting a four and a six respectively off the first two balls of the innings, and there was no stopping after that. Taking the attack to the opposition, he reached the milestones of a fifty in 24 balls, a century in 40 balls and 150 runs in 58 balls. At one stage it seemed he might even get a double century! At the end of 17 overs his score was 166 runs; after that, despite facing 10 more balls, he had to stop 12 runs short of a double hundred.
On the day of such carnage by Pretorius, no other Titans batter could reach the thirties. Riding on his superhuman innings, the team piled up a mountain of 267 runs for 3 wickets, which is the second-highest team total in the history of the CSA T20 Challenge.
Chasing this huge target, the Knights were bundled out for just 143 runs with 16 balls remaining. As a result, the Titans left the field with a one-sided and massive 124-run victory.
Last month, Pretorius had played innings of 94 and 101 runs against Namibia and Zimbabwe respectively in a tri-nation T20 series for South Africa. He carried that national team form into domestic cricket as well. He has so far played two Tests, three ODIs and 17 T20s in the Proteas jersey.
