As India and Sri Lanka are all set to lock horns for the second match at Dharamsala on Saturday, let’s look at some relevant numbers.
Contrasting Journey:
Both teams are going through different paths recently. On one side, India are on a 10 consecutive match winning streak as they haven’t lost a T20I match since their loss against New Zealand in the T20 World Cup.
First, they beat Afghanistan, Scotland, and Namibia in the T20 World Cup then in the bilateral series they clean swept New Zealand and West Indies and they continued their form in the first match as well.
On the other side, the visitors could win just two games in the last 10 T20Is. They won the last match of the 5-match series against Australia to avoid the whitewash. And things didn’t look much different in the first match in Lucknow.
Rain threat:
Rain is always a threat here in Dharamsala. So far 9 T20Is have been scheduled before, 3 of them ended as No result/ abandoned while 2 other games were shortened.
India played just one game here, which was against South Africa in 2015. Despite Rohit Sharma’s century, India lost that match by 7 wickets. Sri Lanka never played a T20I here. However, in the only ODI they played here, they bowled India out for 112.
Milestones awaiting Rohit Sharma:
Rohit Sharma needs one more to become the first player (other than wicketkeeper) from India to take 50 catches in T20I cricket.
Overall he will be the 4th fielder in the world to achieve this feat. David Miller (69 catches), Martin Guptill (64 catches), and Shoaib Malik (50 catches) are the other members of this exclusive club.
Also as he has already become the leading run-scorer in this format, he needs another fifty to go past Virat Kohli on most 50+ score counts.
So far Rohit Sharma scored 30 fifty+ scores in 115 innings which included 4 hundreds as well. Similarly, Virat also scored 30 fifties though he couldn’t reach the three-figure mark in this format.