In the ongoing ODI series between Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, 21-year-old Afghan opener Ibrahim Zadran has already registered two fifty-plus scores in two innings and is on a record-breaking spree in his young ODI career.
In the first match of the ongoing series against Sri Lanka, Zadran scored a match-winning 98, taking his team to a position of safety in a stiff run-chase of 269. That was his ninth ODI innings, and his first fifty. Before that, he had three centuries in his first eight games.
Having made his ODI debut for Afghanistan as a seventeen-year-old in 2019, Zadran has played all of ten matches at the time of writing. Yet, in such a short span of time, he has scored more ODI centuries than Misbah-ul-Haq, Sunil Gavaskar, and Glenn Maxwell, and the same number of ODI centuries as Steve Waugh, Ben Stokes, and Michael Hussey.
To say that Zadran has had a phenomenal start to his ODI career would be an understatement. His aggregate of 585 runs from his first 10 ODIs is the fifth-highest for any batter in their first ten one-day internationals in ODI cricket history, and needless to say, highest among Afghanistan players.
However, all ten ODIs that Zadran has played so far have been against either West Indies, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, or Sri Lanka. Tougher challenges lie ahead of him later this year as Afghanistan are slated to play an ODI series against India, followed by the Asia Cup (potentially), and the World Cup.
With three ODI centuries to his name already, Zadran has the joint third-most ODI centuries among Afghanistan batters along with Rahmanullah Gurbaz. Only Rahmat Shah (five) and Mohammad Shahzad (six) have more.
If Zadran can keep up this dream run, or even a fraction of it, for the next few months, he might break several more long-standing records, and by the time he reaches 22 years of age (December 2023), he might as well become an Afghan legend, with a long and fruitful career ahead of him.
