High five: Bowlers with the most five-wicket hauls in T20 Cricket

Picking a 5-wicket haul in Test and ODI formats might not be the same skill as taking one in the Twenty20 format. However, a T20 innings of only 20 overs and a bowler gets to bowl only 24 balls at max i.e. four overs. Such conditions make the chances of picking a 5-for even tougher for the bowlers. It is probably the reason why no player in the history of the format has picked more than five 5-wicket hauls even as many of them have played over 200 matches in their careers.

Lasith Malinga finds himself at the top of the list with five 5-wicket hauls which came across 295 matches he played. The Sri Lankan pacer has two of his five T20 5-fors coming in the T20I format only. Malinga fell a wicket short of bagging 5-wicket hauls on a total of ten instances. The second spot is occupied by three players with four 5-wicket hauls – Shaheen Shah Afridi, Shakib Al Hasan and David Wiese. Shakib, much like Malinga, missed out of eight occasions where he ended up with four scalps.

Shaheen Shah Afridi, the left-arm pacer from Pakistan, has played only 65 matches in his T20 career till date for the four 5-fors. Interestingly, three of those four 5-wicket hauls came in 2020, all of them in the space of five matches. Shaheen took a 6-wicket haul in the T20 Blast where he took four wickets off four balls and later took 5-wicket hauls in two of the first four games he played in Pakistan’s National T20 Cup. India’s Ankit Rajpoot is the only other player in this list despite playing less than 100 matches thus far (79).

A total of 11 players in Twenty20 history have picked up at least three 5-wicket hauls till date but only two of them are spin bowlers. The Bangladesh all-rounder Shakib Al Hasan (4) and England’s Tom Smith (3) are the spinners with three or more 5-fors in T20 cricket. Interestingly, both the players in this list bowl left-arm orthodox spin only.

(Stats as on December 1, 2020)