Meet India’s First ODI Century Cricketer – Kapil Dev
Meet India’s First ODI Century Cricketer. It isn’t Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Srikkanth, Sandip Patil or Mohinder Amarnath
But, Kapil Dev. He was the first century maker in ODI cricket for India in the 1983 ODI World Cup.
In today’s era, it is not a big deal to score a century in international cricket. Most of the batsmen are successful in scoring more than one century in their career. In earlier times it wasn’t an easy task to score a century. India played its first ODI in 1974 against England but India got its first ODI century after 9 years in 1983.
The 20th match of the 1983 World Cup was being played amidst Zimbabwe and India. In that match, Kapil Dev played a memorable innings for India.
For the unversed in that match, Indian captain Kapil Dev won the toss and chose to bat. Sunil Gavaskar and Srikkanth, who came out to bat, were dismissed for a golden duck. After this, Mohinder Amarnath scored 5, Sandeep Patil scored 1, Yashpal Sharma scored only 9 runs. Kapil Dev came out to bat at number 6 and he played brilliantly to hit the first century in ODIs for India.
Kapil Dev scored 175 runs in this match with 16 fours and 6 sixes. India put up a score of 266 runs in 60 overs and in reply Zimbabwe managed to score only 235 runs in 57 overs and India won the match by 31 runs.
It is to be noted that 1983 World Cup was very special for India as Team India won its first World Cup in 1983. In his cricketing career Kapil Dev played 131 Tests and 225 ODIs. During his illustrious career, Kapil Dev scored 5248 and 3783 runs respectively. He has taken 434 wickets in Tests while 253 wickets in ODI cricket.
News input KV Raman
