India's opening batter Smriti Mandhana scaled a major milestone on Friday, August 4 while playing for Southern Brave in the ongoing The Women's Hundred as she became the first player to score 500 or more runs in the history of the competition.
Smriti has got off to a solid start in the ongoing season of The Hundred. She has notched up two fifties in two matches thus far and has been shouldering the responsibility to do the bulk of the scoring up front. While playing in the first game of the season against Trent Rockets at Trent Bridge in Nottingham, Mandhana scored 55 off just 36 balls at a spectacular strike rate of 152.77 in an innings that saw her hit six fours and two sixes.
Brave won the contest by 27 runs and Mandhana was awarded the Player of the Match for her valuable contribution. While playing in her second match against Welsh Fire, the 27-year-old just picked it up from where she left in the game against Rockets and scored an unbeaten 70 studded with 11 fours and came at a much better strike rate of 166.66.
However, the southpaw couldn't get her team over the line this time around as Brave went down in the contest by a slender margin of four runs. Mandhana has aggregated 503 runs to her credit in the history of the competition and is the only player in the women's event to scale the milestone, second on the list is the skipper of Trent Rockets Nat Sciver-Brunt with 497 runs.
Apart from being the leading run-getter in the tournament, Smriti is also the only player to score five half-centuries in the women's competition - a record that she achieved in her recent outing against Welsh Fire. She went past her compatriot Jemimah Rodrigues, who previously held the record with four fifty-plus scores to her name.
