ICC World Test Championship 2019-21: Top 5 Batsmen With Most Sixes In The Tournament

The inaugural ICC World Test Championship (WTC) will conclude with the final staged between India and New Zealand in Southampton from June 18. Both the teams played top-quality cricket and registered historic victories to make it to the finals for the ultimate crown.

Australia batsman Marnus Labuschagne is the leading run-scorer of the ICC WTC and his teammate Pat Cummins has taken the highest number of wickets (70) so far in the cycle. India’s Ravichandran Ashwin, if selected, will have the opportunity to surpass Cummins as the off-spinner has 67 wickets to his name in the cycle.

Here, we look at which players hit the most sixes in ICC World Test Championship 2019-21:

5. Jos Buttler – 14

Jos Buttler is one of the most fearsome strikers of the cricket ball. A hard-hitting lower-order batsman, Buttler hit 14 sixes in the maiden ICC WTC cycle, where England finished fourth on the table.

Buttler’s best knock came in the Manchester Test against Pakistan last year. Chasing 277 on a two-paced surface, Buttler counter-attacked the visiting bowlers and scored a brisk 75 off 101 balls helping England seal the game, and eventually the series, where he would hit his second Test hundred and confirm his spot in the eleven.

4. Rishabh Pant – 16

Across two series, where he batted in 11 innings, Rishabh Pant has become a folklore hero, a super-star, a legend, aged 23. The left-hander whacked 16 sixes in the 18 innings he batted in in the ICC WTC 2019-21 – 4 of those were to Nathan Lyon, and 6 against Jack Leach.

On the back of his superb batting form, and improved glovework, Pant has now become India’s first-choice keeper across formats.

3. Mayank Agarwal – 18

Mayank Agarwal may find himself out of the first eleven at the moment, his place taken by young Shubman Gill in Australia, but he has made significant contributions to India’s march through to the ICC WTC final.

The right-handed opener scored 857 runs in 12 Tests, at 42.85. He scored three hundred in the tournament, two of which were double hundreds versus South Africa and Bangladesh. Agarwal has harrumphed a total of 18 sixes during this cycle; he hit 8 of those in the double hundred versus the Proteas.

2. Rohit Sharma – 27

Similar to his white-ball career, Rohit Sharma’s Test career took a turn, for good, when he was shifted to the top of the batting order in the home series against South Africa in 2018. He plundered 529 in 4 innings in that series with three hundred, including a double-ton.

He fared decently in a couple of Tests in Australia and then owned the stage with the bat in the home series versus England, where he scored 345 runs at 57.50 on difficult batting tracks in Chennai and Ahmedabad.

In total, Rohit Sharma thumped 27 sixes in his 17 Test innings of the ICC WTC – he could eclipse the batsman with most sixes if he could hammer 5 more sixes, which is clear possibility, in the ICC WTC final against the Kiwi bowlers.

1. Ben Stokes – 31

Unsurprisingly, it is England’s own maverick cricketer, Ben Stokes, who has hit the most sixes so far in the inaugural edition of the ICC WTC. The left-hander spanked 31 sixes in 17 Tests; Stokes’ best effort, in one of the greatest Test innings, came against rivals Australia in the 2019 Ashes Headingley game, where he struck 8 astonishing sixes.

Stokes is the fourth-highest run-scorer, behind Marnus Labuschagne, Joe Root, and Steve Smith, in the ICC WTC cycle with 1334 runs at 46.00; he notched up 4 hundreds and 6 fifties during this period.

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