Sussex captain Cheteshwar Pujara struck a second consecutive hundred in a Royal London ODI Cup match against Surrey on Sunday. His 131-ball 174 was studded with 20 fours and five sixes. This is now Pujara’s career-best List A score.
Sussex racked up 378/6 in 50 overs. Pujara’s hundred comes close on the heels of his 79-ball 107 against Warwickshire on Friday. His scorching knock included a 22-run over, in which he reeled off three fours and a six off Liam Norwell in the 45th over to give Sussex - which eventually fell short by four runs - a shot at chasing a mammoth 311 in 50 overs.
The 34-year-old Test is coming off a sensational stint in the County Championship Division Two, where he was the second-highest run-getter with 1094 runs in 13 innings at average of 109.40. His five scores of 100+ during the season included three double-hundreds, the last of them (231) coming on his County Championship captaincy debut against Middlesex in July.
Pujara’s unbeaten 201 in his first outing of the season against Derbyshire in April was his first triple-digit score in First-Class cricket in more than two years. His last hundred before that had come in January 2020 for Saurashtra against Karnataka in a Ranji Trophy match.
A torrent of runs for Sussex eventually earned him a recall to the national side for the rescheduled fifth Test against England in July, in which he scored 13 and 66 while opening the batting.
Having long been a mainstay in the Indian middle-order in Test cricket, Pujara had been dropped from the squad for the home series against Sri Lanka in February, following a lean patch that had seen him average 26.29 since the beginning of 2020 in the longest format.
Comments
SHARE