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With a tournament called ‘The Big Bash’ and in order to live up to its name, it has always been necessary to have players plundering balls to the boundary and hitting bowlers into the stands. It is fair to say that the players have delivered with 50 batters hitting over 1000 runs in the competition to date. We take a look at some of the best big bash top run scorers of all time and also look at who would maybe have taken the BBL to even bigger heights.
Contents
The Three Big Bash Top Run Scorers
There may have been 50 players to score over 1000 runs in the BBL, but only two have made more than 3000. All three have become synonymous with the big bash with two of them developing into words and brands of their own!
Chris Lynn – Lynnsanity
Surely the leading run scorer in BBL history has a right to claim to be one of the ultimate big bash top run scorers? Chris Lynn had scored over 3000 BBL runs for Brisbane Heat before he switched Queensland for South Australia and signed for Adelaide Strikers ahead of the 2022-23 campaign.
Brisbane Heat’s loss has proved to be Adelaide Strikers’ gain with the man who brings ‘Lynnsanity’ to contests, leading the big bash top run scorers list after Match 29. Lynn is one of only four players to have hit 100 BBL sixes but is the only one of the four to be approaching a double century of maximums. He has scored 77 more sixes than his nearest challenger and has a strike rate of 147.07 from 107 BBL innings.
Aaron Finch – Australia’s T20I Captain
The right-handed Melbourne Renegade is approaching his 100th BBL match but has already brought up 3000 BBL runs during this year’s tournament. After Lynn’s switch to the Strikers, Aaron Finch now has the honour of being the highest scoring ‘one-club-man’ in the history of the competition.
The Australia T20I captain is one of seven players to have hit two BBL centuries with his first coming in BBL2 and his second seven years later in BBL9. And although he has a marginally better average (35.10) than Chris Lynn (34.73), his strike rate of 132.03 is 14 below.
Finch seems to have found a new lease on life in BBL12 and we expect him to keep hitting runs in this tournament for plenty more seasons to come.
Glenn Maxwell – The Big Show
You don’t get the nickname ‘The Big Show’ without being a player who brings razzmatazz and entertainment to fans across the globe. Glenn Maxwell does exactly that and even managed to break his leg in spectacular fashion – slipping at a friend’s 50th birthday party – an injury which ruled the Melbourne Stars’ skipper out of this year’s tournament.
He is the man with the highest big bash score – 154* from only 64 balls against Hobart Hurricanes in January 2022; the highest strike rate of any player to have hit over 1000 BBL runs – 150.84; and one of only four players to have hit multiple BBL centuries in the same tournament.
Now you know why he’s called ‘The Big Show’!
Coming Up On The Rails
Lynn, Finch and Maxwell have all undoubtedly stood the test of time, after making their BBL debuts back in 2011, but what of the players who have not racked up 100 appearances but are still making their presence felt in the tournament?
Two names stand out, and if we were to ask the question of the ultimate Big Bash Top run scorer again in a few more years, there is every chance that they will be in the mix.
Alex Hales
The English right-handed opener was forced to spend three years in the international wilderness after falling out with captain Eoin Morgan over ‘trust’ issues. But the man they call ‘levers’, due to his long arm span, has continued to bludgeon runs in the BBL and even got his place back in the England team just in time for their successful 2022 T20 World Cup campaign.
Hales has represented Adelaide Strikers, Hobart Hurricanes, Melbourne Renegades and, from 2019-20 onwards, Sydney Thunder. At the time of writing, he has hit 2102 runs from 68 innings at a strike rate of 150.68 – bettered only by ‘The Big Show’.
Ben McDermott
Another player to have represented multiple sides, Mcdermott became the only player in BBL history to score centuries in successive games when he hit 110* and 127 over the course of three days in December 2021. Not content with taking that record, at the same time he also became the first player to register three BBL tons after making 114 back in January 2017.
McDermott finished the 2021-22 BBL season as the tournament’s leading Big Bash top run scorers and hit 979 runs across BBL10 and BBL12. With his current form, it will not be long before he is joining the big names as part of the 3000 BBL runs the club.
Highest Big Bash Scores
Glenn Maxwell (154*) heads the list of top scores in the competition with Marcus Stoinis (147*), Matthew Wade (130*), Ben McDermott (127) and D’Arcy Short (122*) the other players to have broken 120.
Special Mentions
Not all batters get to play in the BBL throughout their prime years. Due to their big contributions, we feel Brad Hodge and Kevin Pietersen should also be highlighted.
Hodge still leads the Big Bash averages on 42.78 from 50 innings, whilst KP made 10 half-centuries for Melbourne Stars from only 33 innings.
How good would the BBL be with these guys?
Finally, no tournament is perfect and there is always a tinge of regret that some of yesteryear’s great attacking cricketers have never had a chance to play in the tournament. You can only imagine how great an Ian Botham spell with Brisbane Heat would have worked out, or how many runs Brian Charles Lara or Viv Richards would have made in a BBL season!
Then there is also the matter of the BCCI’s continual refusal to allow their players to compete in foreign T20 leagues. Would one season of Virat Kohli at the Adelaide Strikers really ruin the IPL? Maybe we’ll never know!
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