BENGALURU, Nov 21: Cricket seemed to have entered the space age on Monday riding on an astonishing batting display.
First, Tamil Nadu batter Narayan Jagadeesan shattered the world record for the highest ever individual score in men’s List A cricket (50-over one-day game) by hammering a 141-ball 277 against Arunachal Pradesh in the Vijay Hazare Trophy here.
Then, Tamil Nadu became the first team to breach the 500-mark in List A cricket before winning the Group C match by 435 runs, making it the biggest victory margin at this level. The previous record was Somerset’s 346-run win over Devon in 1990.
This was after the 26-year-old Jagadeesan etched his name in history books by becoming the first-ever player to score five consecutive centuries in men’s List A cricket.
He also went past Alistair Brown and Rohit Sharma to set a new record for the highest individual score.
Brown’s previous high of 268 for Surrey came against Glamorgan in 2002. The Indian record for highest List A score of 264 by Rohit in an ODI against Sri Lanka was also obliterated in the process.
With their team total of 506/2, Tamil Nadu bettered the previous best of 498 for four by England against the Netherlands earlier this year.
The previous highest List A total in India was 457 for four by Mumbai against Puducherry in Jaipur in 2021.
Released by Chennai Super Kings recently, Jagadeesan also served a reminder of his abilities before the IPL auction.
Veteran India cricketer and Jagadeesan’s TN teammate Dinesh Karthik congratulated him and said in a tweet: “WORLD RECORD alert. What an amazing effort by @Jagadeesan_200 Couldn’t be happier for him. Big things await. Sai Sudarshan what an amazing tournament so far. This opening combo is killing it. Well done boys.”
Hinting at the gulf in standards, he said in another tweet: “Also on another side note Does it make sense to have the north east teams play the elite teams in the league phase. It just topples the run rates of teams and imagine if a match against one of these teams gets rained off! Can’t they have a separate group and then qualify?” (PTI)