He may have turned 38 on 1 March, but Shahid ‘Boom Boom’ Afridi, age has always been but a number.
In between his conditional retirements, Afridi went on to break a number of records of which 13 still stand unbroken.
The swashbuckling Pakistani made his debut in 1996 and the soon became the youngest batsman in ODI history to bring up a century at the age of 16 years 217 days.
For a long time, his 37-ball 100 was the fastest century in ODI, before New Zealand’s Corey Anderson scored a 36-ball hundred in 2014 against West Indies. Later in 2015, AB de Villiers, playing against West Indies took only 31 balls to bring up his hundred.
Afridi continues to lead the list of most number of sixes hit by a player in ODIs, with 351 sixes.
Regarded to be one of the most explosive batsmen in cricket history, Afridi has the highest batting strike-rate in ODIs of 117, among batsmen who have scored more than 3000 runs. Not only ODIs, Shahid Afridi has host of records in T20Is too.
Apart from being the most-capped player with 98 matches, Afridi also leads the list of the highest wicket-takers. He has taken 97 wickets till date in the T20Is. With 11 Man of the Match awards, Afridi tops the list in T20Is.
Afridi is Pakistan’s most capped player in ODIs with 393 matches. With 32 awards, he has won the most number of Man of the Match awards by a Pakistan cricketer in ODIs.
On three occasions, Afridi has scored a fifty in 18 balls, which is the record for the fastest 50 by a Pakistani player in ODIs.
Afridi still holds the record of hitting the maximum number of sixes in an ODI innings by a Pakistani player. He had hit eleven sixes en route to his 37-ball 100.
Till date, Afridi is the only Pakistani batsman to hit sixes off 4 consecutive balls in Test against India in 2006. The bowler in question, Harbhajan Singh went for 27 runs in a single over and Afridi went on to score the most number of runs by Pakistani batsman in an over in a Test.
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