Eighteen years after becoming the youngest wicketkeeper in Test cricket when he was 17 with a baby face in Nottingham, Parthiv Patel has announced his retirement from all forms of the game.
Patel finished with 25 tests, 38 ODI and two T20I, his last international appearance was in India’s famous test victory in Johannesburg in January 2018. A year later, he was also part of the team when India won a series of tests in Australia for the first time. time in its history.
In addition to playing for India, Patel will be remembered for his contributions to Gujarat. He led the team to the Vijay Hazare Trophy in 2015, scoring a first A-List victory of the century in the final against Delhi. He surpassed that achievement the next season, when he made 143 against Mumbai to help Gujarat achieve the most successful chase in a Ranji Trophy final.
Just two months before the Ranji Trophy triumph, Patel had earned a test retirement after eight years, before Test 3 against England in Mohali. Their inclusion was so abrupt that Patel, who was Gujarat’s captain in a first-class match at Hubli at the time, had to make an eight-hour road trip to Goa before reaching Chandigarh via a stopover in New Delhi on the eve of the match. match.
Patel was always a fearless hitter, a quality he showed even in his Test debut when he held the fold for 84 minutes and helped save the game with an undefeated 19. This facet of his game earned him the occasional promotion to open batting. , which he did so memorably by keeping out the fiery Shoaib Akhtar and scoring 69 in the decisive Rawalpindi test of the 2004 tour from India to Pakistan. In all, he scored six half centuries in testing, with a record of 71 against England in Chennai in 2016.
Patel took an unusual route to the top tier: He captained India at the 2002 U19 World Cup, played for India A, Y he played test cricket before playing senior domestic cricket. He settled into the test team quickly, playing 19 of India’s 20 tests since his debut, but a drop in the quality of his glove work – the defeat of Ricky Ponting on the final day of the 2004 Sydney Test It was a particularly notable mistake – it led to his exclusion. The appearance of Dinesh Karthik and later MS Dhoni pushed him further down the pecking order, and his appearances thereafter were sporadic – a one-off test in 2008 when Dhoni opted out of a series of tests in Sri Lanka, a handful of white ball games. as a specialized opener in 2011 and early 2012, and five more events in 2016-2018.
While his international career was an on and off affair, Patel was an IPL regular, generally a shocking presence at the top of the order. He was part of three title-winning teams, the Chennai Super Kings in 2010 and the Mumbai Indians in 2015 and 2017, and was Mumbai’s longest running back in 2017 with 395 runs with a strike rate of 134.81. He played for six IPL franchises in total, most recently for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2019. He was part of their squad in 2020 as well, but did not get a game with the team that preferred to use AB de Villiers as their first team. Goalkeeper of choice and promotion Devdutt Padikkal to open the batting.
Patel ended his career with numbers that placed him in elite company. In all top-class cricket in India, he scored 9500 runs with an average of 44.18; only Wasim Jaffer, Cheteshwar Pujara, Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir have scored more. Overall, he finished with 11,240 first-class runs averaging 43.49, with 27 hundreds, including a best of 206 against Odisha in the 2008-09 season, as well as 486 sacks and 77 strains.
He remains the fourth-youngest rookie in the event for India, behind only Tendulkar, Piyush Chawla and L Sivaramakrishnan.
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