Four wickets

There are two main tasks in the professional cricket championship: to knock out the batsman with the help of high-quality innings and also to earn as many runs as possible after the bowler throws the ball at the batsman.

To knock at least one batsman out per innings or game is already a sign that a bowler has good skills in his innings. The batting team needs only such bowlers. Because the faster the team knocks all the batsmen out, the less runs the batting team will earn.

Four wickets (also 4WI) is one of the major achievements in cricket. Not every cricketer can knock out four wickets in one inning. Always when serving, the wicket is protected by a player with a bat. If the wicket is knocked out – the real batsman leaves the field. However, to score four wickets means not only to knock out the wicket with the ball. The phrase four wickets can describe all the ways a batsman can be dismissed, for example:

• Direct knocking of the wicket;
• After the throw, the ball bounces off the bat and falls into the hands of the wicketkeeper;
• After the kick, the ball is immediately caught by the fielders (without bouncing off the ground);
• After serving, the ball hits the feet of the player with the bat.

Taking four or more wickets in one inning is most often found in One Day or Twenty20 matches.

Lasith Malinga is a professional cricketer from Sri Lanka. Malinga has a number of interesting records and achievements, but the most amazing is that this cricketer is the only player in the world who was able to take four wickets in four innings in a row in two different matches.

The first time this happened was in the 2007 ODI Cricket World Cup between Sri Lanka and South Africa. Malinga was not involved as a batsman then. He put all his professionalism into serving. Thanks to this, in one of the overs, he was able to knock out four batsmen from the game for four consecutive throws.

This unique achievement was managed to repeat 12 years later, in 2019, at a T20I match. Then Sri Lanka met with the New Zealand national team. Lasith Malinga managed to knock out four wickets immediately for four balls in a row in one of the overs. After the match, the record-holder was able to comment on his result with the following words:

I have certain skills in knocking out wickets that I can use better than others. I don’t care who believes in it or not; the main thing is that I believe in it. That’s why I always want to control the game when I get the ball in my hands.

According to official statistics, the last player who managed to hit more than four wickets in one inning (6 wickets) in a test match was the English player Jonathan Marc Bairstow in 2016 (a game against South Africa).

In ODI matches, such an achievement was last registered at the beginning of 2020. Nepalese player Karan KC was able to take four wickets in one inning at the game against the Oman national team.

As for the matches of the T20I format, the last player to do so was Deepak Chahar, who was able to knock out six wickets in one inning in a match against Bangladesh in November 2019.

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