Top 5 most sixes by a captain in international cricket ft. Rohit Sharma
Indian captain Rohit Sharma on Friday, August 2, made an ODI comeback like he never left after the 2023 World Cup. He was at his fluent best against Sri Lanka in Colombo, scoring 58 runs off 47 balls - the second-highest in a rare tied ODI.
Rohit hit seven boundaries and three sixes. The final maximum put his name in golden letters on the record books. He has now hit the most sixes in ODIs as a captain, in just 134 international innings spread across seven years.
To put that into context, let's look at the top-five on the list:
#5 Brendon McCullum (New Zealand) - 170
New Zealand's revolutionary captain Brendon McCullum is at fifth with 170 sixes in 140 innings. He started captaining in 2008 and continued for a bit after the heartbreak of the 2015 ODI World Cup.
McCullum mostly played as an opener and in a way heralded the modern era of aggressive openers who didn't put too much value on their wickets, even at the biggest stages. When Rohit put those exemplary performances last year, he drew more comparisons with McCullum than anyone else.
#4 Ricky Ponting (Australia) - 171
Legendary Australia captain Ricky Ponting slots in at fourth on this list with 171 sixes. That's just one more than McCullum but in a whopping 236 innings more than the Kiwi.
Ponting was never a big six-hitter, even in his 10-year-long captaincy career which began in 2002. Instead, he was known for his boundary-finding skills, hitting as many as 1,576 fours in this period as international captain, almost thrice as many as McCullum.
#3 MS Dhoni (India) - 211
Although Rohit has earned a name for his captaincy, in India still when you put "captain" and "six" together in a sentence, the first name that comes to everyone's mind is MS Dhoni.
He's iconic for the big six over long-on at the Wankhede Stadium in the 2011 ODI World Cup final, but Dhoni hit 210 more sixes as captain in international cricket between 2007-2018 across 330 innings. He was one of the first in Indian cricket to trust his maximums even in Test cricket and famously threatened many oppositions in white-ball formats.
He was at the top of the list for a good while until Eoin Morgan came along.
#2 Eoin Morgan (England) - 233
A bit of what Dhoni and McCullum did for India and New Zealand, respectively, Eoin Morgan did for England, at least in white-ball cricket. After their embarrassing exit from the 2015 World Cup, Morgan rebuilt the team from scratch, injecting high-intent cricket, using data, and picking specific players to support his vision.
More importantly, he led from the front - hitting 233 sixes in 180 innings for the 11 years between 2011 and 2022. There were some matches where he blew the opposition away with this ability, like the 2019 ODI World Cup match against Afghanistan where he smashed 17 maximums.
His legacy was fittingly sealed by the win in the final at Lord's.
#1 Rohit Sharma (India) - 234
The fact that Rohit has broken Morgan's record in just 134 innings and in much less time is just a huge testament to his brutal skills with the bat. He's almost unparalleled in the current era for how well he can hit his sixes and how he picks the perfect moment to show off his abilities too.
Everyone else on this list is an iconic leader. Rohit might have not been able to get India an ODI World Cup but his revolution into an unselfish big-hitting machine at the top of the order has created a special legacy, and this record is only one of the many proofs of it.