Mayank Agarwal continues impressive show with another century
Mayank Agarwal's golden run with the bat continued as he notched up another hundred on Friday at the Holkar Stadium in Indore as India took the lead on day two of the first Test. Despite Abu Jayed's early strikes, Mayank hanged on and took India clear of further troubles along with Ajinkya Rahane in the first session before finally completing his century in the second session.
The opener has been in sensational touch since making his debut in Australia in the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and since then, has gone from strength to strength. Mayank has now scored the most number of Test runs as an opener since making his international debut on December 26, 2018 and there are no signs of stopping him as things stand.
However, he stands second in the list of overall runs scored since his debut with Steve Smith leading the charts with 774 and Quinton de Kock (629), Ben Stokes (627) and Rohit Sharma (603) being the others in the top five.
In Indore, Mayank was dropped once and survived an LBW decision thanks to a good DRS call after he was given out LBW to Mehedy Hasan in the 47th over. Barring that, the Karnataka opener has been fluent in scoring and kept the scorecard ticking along with Cheteshwar Pujara at first and then Ajinkya Rahane post the two quick wickets.
Mayank hit 13 boundaries and one six in his innings and willingly played second fiddle to Pujara while he was taking on the bowlers. Once Pujara got out, he played more shots and managed to score runs freely. However, this innings of Mayank's was not as attacking as others as he played at a strike-rate of 54.82 compared to the 60s and 70s in other innings.
This was Mayank's third century in red-ball cricket and the 28-year-old also has a double century to his name, which came against South Africa at Visakhapatnam in the first Test. The right-hander also has three fifties to his name and scored 615 runs from 7 Tests at an average of 55.90 before the start of the game.
Mayank came on to this Test series on the back of a century in a List A game for India C against India A in the Deodhar Trophy.
