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India's pace-bowling all-rounder Hardik Pandya, who is not a part of the ongoing New Zealand ODIs due to workload management ahead of T20 World Cup in February, missed an opportunity to start off his year with bang, with a chance join an elite club featuring icons like Sachin Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh, Kapil Dev, Sanath Jayasuriya, Viv Richards, and Jacques Kallis, among others, as a rare breed of ODI players with 2,000 runs and 100 wickets.
India will resume its mission' '2027 World Cup' with these ODIs against the Kiwis, and the series is missing some trademark Hardik swagger, flamboyance and charisma. And the all-rounder will have to wait a little longer to rewrite the record books. Currently in 94 ODIs and 68 innings, Hardik has scored 1,904 runs at an average of 32.82, with a strike rate of almost 111, with 11 fifties to his name, with a best score of 92*. He needs 96 more runs to touch the 2,000 ODI-run mark. Also, in his ODI career, Hardik has taken 91 wickets at an average of 35.50, with best figures of 4/24. He stands just nine wickets away from a century of wickets. If he completes this double in future, he will join an elite group of Indian cricketers like Sachin (18,426 runs and 154 wickets), Ganguly (11,363 runs and 100 wickets), Yuvraj (8,701 runs and 111 wickets), Kapil (3,783 runs and 253 wickets), Ravi Shastri (3,108 runs and 109 wickets), and Ravindra Jadeja (2,862 runs and 232 wickets) as the seventh Indian to achieve this double, which has also been achieved by Sri Lanka's Jayasuriya, West Indies' icon Viv Richards, Australian legends Shane Watson and Andrew Symonds, South African stars Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusner, and Kallis, and England icons Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff among several others. Squads: India Squad: Rohit Sharma, Shubman Gill(c), Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul(w), Washington Sundar, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Harshit Rana, Kuldeep Yadav, Arshdeep Singh, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Ravindra Jadeja New Zealand Squad: Devon Conway(w), Will Young, Henry Nicholls, Daryl Mitchell, Glenn Phillips, Michael Bracewell(c), Zakary Foulkes, Nick Kelly, Josh Clarkson, Michael Rae, Kyle Jamieson, Mitchell Hay, Adithya Ashok, Kristian Clarke, and Jayden Lennox. (ANI).
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