How Nicholas Pooran’s 165 sixes in 2024 have left all Chris Gayle super-seasons far behind

Nicholas Pooran nearly welcomed his 29th birthday with a second hundred in succession within three days last Tuesday.

The Trinbago Knight Riders maverick has had an invincible run in T20s this year. With an impending crisis in the Caribbean Premier League eliminator against the Barbados Royals, Pooran was the man to watch.

It needed something absurd to put him off his tracks. Never could Pooran and the Knight Riders have envisaged the light towers at the Providence Stadium to cast their doom. The Knights’ innings was halted at 19.1 overs with Pooran stranded on 91 when a faulty tower went off, forcing a stoppage of an hour and a half. A reduced target of 60 in five overs and a blistering chase powered by David Miller knocked Pooran and his men out of the tournament.

Even by the marauding standards of the Caribbean batters, none have had a more prolific season as Pooran had this CPL edition, 504 runs in 11 innings, averaging 56 with a 169.69 strike rate. Having plundered bowling attacks across eight countries and as many tournaments, in international and franchise colours already this year, Pooran’s latest episode of carnage may not be a complete surprise.

Annus Mirabillis

But the 67 innings that Pooran has already played in 2024 will be labelled in the record books for no batter has had a greater run in a T20 calendar year. The Trinidadian has butchered nearly every major landmark in T20 batting this year.

T20 legend Chris Gayle’s 135 sixes in 2015 was considered unbreakable on the circuit. But despite hoarding No. 3 and middle-order spots for his respective sides, Pooran surmounted the peak on September 1 and later became the first man to smash 150 sixes in a year. He also stormed past Pakistan’s Mohammad Rizwan’s tally of 2036 runs from 2021 to become the highest run-getter ever in a calendar year. The duo remain the only batters to have crossed the 2000-run mark in a year.

💯 Nicholas Pooran 💯

🤯 101 runs from just 59 balls

🔢 9 x 4’s and 8 x 6’s

📺 Catch all the action as the 🌴@CPL hots up!#CPL24 pic.twitter.com/GYme1Q3Mgq

— Willow TV Canada (@willowtv_canada) September 30, 2024

But unlike the typically cautious Rizwan, Pooran armed his big-hitting with consistency to open the doors to a new realm of T20 batting. Over 71 per cent (1606) of Pooran’s 2251 runs this year were born from boundaries. The sixes, 165 currently, make up nearly 1000 runs of this aggregate.

While the increased number of innings helps, this is also a year where Pooran has been twice the bat he has been throughout the last decade between 2013 and 2023. His average lurked around 25 in his previous 297 innings before 2024. Pooran has shored up the consistency mark to nearly 45 runs per innings this year. Coupled with his brutal scoring rates, the jaw-dropping results have accounted for over 27 per cent of his entire T20 career runs within 10 months!

The upswing is bewildering, particularly on the sixes front. Always a notorious white-ball bludgeoner, Pooran vaulted from 16th to the fourth spot on the all-time six-hitting charts in nine months, overtaking active white-ball phenoms Rohit Sharma, Jos Buttler, Glenn Maxwell and Miller. Only a famous Caribbean trio in Gayle, Kieron Pollard and Andre Russell stands before him. His rate of six-hitting, a maximum every 9.62 deliveries, is only bettered by Russell (7.28) and Gayle (9.51) among players with at least 3000 T20 runs.

Pooran has also donned numerous roles for his franchises and the West Indies this season, batting in the top order and stepping up for the finishing slots in the middle order. Interestingly, he has been at his best at No. 3, almost redefining the role of the top-order spot while piling up 1191 runs with a 40-plus average and a whopping 160.91 strike rate. He is only the second No. 3 in T20 history to record over 1000 runs in a year, behind South Africa’s Rilee Rossouw.

He is not done just yet. With the West Indies slated to play another 11 T20Is by December, the 29-year-old can conjure up more mind-boggling landmarks before the close of 2024.

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