The International Cricket Council (ICC) has crowned Pakistan skipper Babar Azam with its ODI Player of the Year award 2022 for his spectacular performance in the calendar year.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old batter has won the ICC ODI Player of the Year award for the second consecutive year with his “match-winning knocks, spell-binding stroke-play and memorable moments from a personal perspective and his team in 2022”.
\nDuring 2022, Babar scored 679 runs from nine matches at an average of 84.87 with three centuries in ODI cricket during 2022.<\/p>\n
The ICC reminisced some of Babar’s memorable performances and outstanding achievements of the year.<\/p>\n
A year to remember
\nWhat Babar produced during 2022 was even better than 2021, a year for him to remember in ODI cricket, as the “ultra-consistent right-hander maintained his lead” as the No.1 ranked batter on the MRF Tyres ICC Men’s ODI Player Rankings.<\/p>\n
It’s a title that Babar has held firmly onto since July 2021 and on current form, has no intention of letting go easily.<\/p>\n
It might be surprising to note that the prolific batter only played nine ODI matches in 2022, but made them count by smashing three centuries, another five half-centuries and only really failed with the bat on one occasion.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t just from an individual level that Babar thrived, with the Pakistan captain also leading his team with aplomb and to just one loss throughout the year.”<\/p>\n
Memorable performance
\nThe 28-year-old put up back-to-back incredible ODI performances in 2022, but none was more memorable or as good as the outstanding 114 against Australia in Lahore in March.<\/p>\n
It was a must-win encounter for Pakistan after they fell to a loss in the series opener against an always-difficult Australian side and Babar delivered when his country needed him most as the Asian side chased down a massive total of 349 for the loss of just four wickets and with six deliveries to spare.<\/p>\n
Openers Fakhar Zaman and Imam-ul-Haq laid the foundation with a 118-run stand to get the run chase going before Babar put on a masterclass in chasing a total.<\/p>\n
Walking out to bat when his team needed 231 from 187 balls, Babar almost took his side home with an exceptional display of shot-making.<\/p>\n
He brought up his hundred from just 73 balls – his fastest ever in ODI cricket – and stuck around until the 45th over with the victory target in sight.<\/p>\n
The rest of the batters finished the job as Pakistan recorded their highest-ever successful chase in ODIs and it was no surprise that their inspirational skipper was deservedly named Player of the Match.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Babar was also named captain of the ICC ODI Team of the Year for 2022.<\/p>\n
It must be noted that he was also captain of the ICC ODI Team of the Year in 2021.<\/p>\n
The winners of ICC Awards are identified from the results of the ICC Voting Academy, comprising a wider selection of global cricket journalists and broadcasters, with cricket fans also contributing to the vote via the ICC\u2019s digital channels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The International Cricket Council (ICC) has crowned Pakistan skipper Babar Azam with its ODI Player of the Year award 2022 for his spectacular performance in the calendar year. The 28-year-old batter has won the ICC ODI Player of the Year award for the second consecutive year with his “match-winning knocks, spell-binding stroke-play and memorable moments […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":112532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,23,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-islamabad","category-national","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112533,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112531\/revisions\/112533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/112532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}