Bristol: Indian captain Mithali Raj overcame Charlotte Edwards’ record for most of the women’s ODI cricket races on Wednesday during the ICC Women’s World Cup match against Australia at Bristol’s County Ground.
Also for Mithali’s achievement, Raj has achieved the feat in fewer games compared to Edwards. The Indian pattern also has the third highest all-time average in the ODI cricket.
A distinctive feature of Raj’s prolific career has been his consistency. In 1999, she burst onto the scene as a 16-year-old with a hundred in her debut against Ireland in Milton Keynes, an innings that still makes her the youngest centennial of ODI ever.
Three years later, and still only 19, Raj returned to the headlines again, scoring 214 against England at Taunton in a test match. That episode was the highest individual score of the test at that time, a record surpassed only by Kiran Baluch of Pakistan in 2004.
Raj has often been nicknamed the “Women’s Cricket Sachin Tendulkar” and shares one of the greatest traits of the little master – longevity. 18 years after her debut, she is still breaking records, and she recently became the first woman to score seven consecutive fifty in ODI cricket.
Perhaps Raj’s most notable statistic, however, is that she has averaged over 40 in ODIs in 15 calendar years since her debut – the same number that Tendulkar handled over her own career. At age 34, he still has time aside to improve Tendulkar’s record.
Raj has also been the commander of his country in the field, captaining since 2004 with the exception of a five-year period between 2008 and 2012. The highlight of his captaincy came in 2005 when, at age 22, he captained India In her first Women’s World Cup final, but was defeated by Australia.
Raj is likely to break another record held by Edwards in the not too distant future with the 105 games she has captained second on the list behind the former England captain 117. In those 105 games, India has come out Better than the matches in Which he has returned to the ranks – winning 61 percent compared to 53 percent when he has played without being captain.
