Former Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi is someone who has always had numerous on-field and off-field clashes with the Indian players. He has also publically criticized many of the top Indian players on various occasions. But despite all this, he admires a lot of Indian cricketers from both past and present. In his latest Twitter Q&A session, he named his favourite Indian batsman.
Former Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi, who recently recovered from COVID-19 took to twitter to answer few of the queries of his fans under the hashtag #AskAfridi. Out of the many questions asked by his beloved fans, one of the most interesting one was to name his favourite Indian batsman. Afridi who has played against some of the legends of Indian cricket including Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid etc named the modern-day torchbearers of Indian batting lineup Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma as his favourites.
This came in as no surprise as Kohli and Rohit are on the way to break some of the longstanding records in world cricket. The Indian captain is way ahead of his contemporaries and is only behind the great Sachin Tendulkar in terms of the number of hundreds scored in International cricket. He has 70 International hundreds so far (43 in ODIs and 27 in Tests).
Rohit, on the other hand, had been in sublime form over the last few years. He has three double centuries in ODI cricket with the highest score of 264* which is matched by no one else. Ever since opening the batting for India, he had been keeping up with Kohli in white-ball cricket.
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When asked to name his all-time favourite batsman, Afridi, however, took the name of West Indian legend Viv Richards. As an answer to one of the queries, he added that Brian Lara and AB de Villiers are the two of the best batsmen he has ever bowled at.
During the Q&A session, he also heaped much praise on Australian fast bowler Pat Cummins and even named him as the best bowler among the current lot.
He also rated former Indian captain, MS Dhoni, as a better captain than Ricky Ponting as Dhoni built a team of youngsters from scratch.
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