Rashid Khan Is Closing On 200 T20I Wickets, a Number Nobody Has Reached
He went into the India series seven short. No bowler in the history of T20 internationals has taken 200, and the way he has taken his says as much as the total.
Rashid Khan went into Afghanistan's current series against India seven wickets short of 200 in T20 internationals. No bowler has reached that mark. He will almost certainly reach it this month.
Why the number is unusual
T20 internationals are not played evenly. A bowler from a full member nation with a crowded calendar plays a lot of them; a bowler from an associate or emerging nation plays fewer but often against weaker opposition. Rashid's 200 will arrive from a career spent mostly in the second category and increasingly in the first, which makes the total harder to dismiss than it would be from either side alone.
He made his debut in 2015, as a teenager, at a time when Afghanistan were still establishing themselves in the format. The leg spin was the same then as it is now: quick through the air, minimal loop, and a googly that is genuinely difficult to read from the hand rather than merely difficult to score off.
The economy is the real record
Wickets are the headline and the economy rate is the achievement. Rashid has spent a decade bowling four overs in the middle of T20 innings, which is the phase where captains most want a wicket and batters most want to attack, and he has kept conceding fewer runs than almost anyone bowling the same overs.
That combination is rare. Bowlers who take wickets in this format usually buy them. Bowlers who are economical usually do it by being hard to hit rather than hard to survive. Doing both, for ten years, is the career.
The context around the milestone
Mohammad Nabi is approaching a milestone in the same series, having gone into it 52 runs short of 2,500 T20I runs, which no Afghanistan batter has reached.
Both men are now the senior figures in a side captained by Ibrahim Zadran, who is 24 and in his first series as full time T20I captain. Afghanistan's cricket has reached the point where the generation that built it is handing over rather than holding on, which is a healthier place than it sounds.
What happens after this series
Afghanistan's next assignment is the Asian Games in Japan, where the men's cricket tournament runs from 24 September to 3 October.