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AL AMARAT: Nepal’s middle-order batter Dipendra Singh Airee bagged another dominant record in T20 cricket as he became the third male batter to hit six sixes in an over in T20Is.
Airee wreaked havoc in the final over of Nepal’s innings against Qatar in the seventh match of the ACC Men’s Premier Cup, being played at the AI Amerat Cricket Ground in Oman.
The right-handed batter struck Kamran Khan for 36 runs in the final over, clubbing six consecutive sixes.
His final-over blitz propelled him to an unbeaten half-century. His 64-run knock, coming off 21 deliveries, featured three boundaries and seven sixes.
Former Indian all-rounder Yuvraj Singh was the first batter to hit six sixes in an over in T20Is. The left-handed batter achieved the feat in the 2007 World T20.
Yuvraj’s long-standing record was then equalled by his West Indian counterpart Kieron Pollard in 2021 when he took Sri Lanka’s Akila Dhananjaya to the cleaners.
For the unversed, Dipendra Singh Airee also holds the record of scoring the fastest half-century in the history of T20 cricket in a record-breaking Asian Games match between Nepal and Mongolia.
Airee came out to bat with only 11 balls left but made the best out of available resources and struck the fastest fifty in T20 cricket, taking just nine deliveries.
The record was previously held by Yuvraj Singh in T20Is, while Chris Gayle and Hazratullah Zazai held the record in domestic franchise cricket. They all took 12 balls to score a fifty.
In his undefeated 10-ball 52, Dipendra Singh Airee scored at a strike rate of 520, marking the first instance in T20s where a batter has scored at a strike rate exceeding 500 in an innings of 10 or more balls.