Heinrich Klaasen’s absurd recent run in T20 cricket has invariably invoked comparisons with Suryakumar Yadav.
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If IPL 2024 ends today due to unforeseen circumstances, Heinrich Klaasen will end the edition with 143 runs at 227 – the highest strike rate for anyone in a single season IPL history with a 100-run cut-off.
Too small a sample, you may say, but Klaasen has faced 63 balls this season and has been dismissed just once despite coming late in the innings and playing high-risk shots. He has hit 15 sixes in 63 balls this season – about three every two overs.
You may still point at the sample size. Fair enough. Let us add another season to that. Since the start of IPL 2023, Klaasen has 591 runs in the IPL at 187. With a 500-run cut-off Suryakumar Yadav (605 at 181) – we shall return to him – is the only one in the vicinity. No one else has hit the 165-mark.
After two forgettable seasons in 2018 and 2019, Klaasen did not play in the IPL for three consecutive years. Despite that, so prolific has he been since 2023 that his IPL strike rate of 176 is the highest in IPL history with a 500-run cut-off.
Is Klaasen’s form restricted only to the IPL? His career T20 strike rate of 152, while excellent, does not boggle the mind – largely, he was a promising but unexceptional batter for a long time. Until the end of 2021, he struck at 138 while averaging 26.88: since then, the numbers read 165 and 40.03.
However, it is since the start of 2023 that Klaasen has turned beast mode on. His strike rate of 177 is the highest for anyone with a 1,000 run cut-off – and he averages 43. In other words, he has amassed runs at absurd pace without getting out across three continents over a 15-month phase.
It is important to dig slightly deeper into Klaasen’s record over this period. In the 2023 SA20, he scored 363 runs at 164 and an average of 60.50. In the IPL, 448 at 177 and 49.77. In The Hundred, 189 at 178 and 31.50. In the 2024 SA20, 447 at 208 and 49.63. And in the 2024 IPL, as we saw, 143 runs, once dismissed, strike rate 227. His other six innings over this period were spread across three series.
Add to that his numbers in the Major League Cricket in the USA, a 20-over tournament that did not get T20 status, and the strike rate since the start of 2023 jumps to 186 and the average to 43.46.
Batters have had ridiculous great phases in T20 cricket. Chris Gayle in the early 2010s. Andre Russell later that decade. And AB de Villiers for major parts of it. Luke Wright and Imran Nazir before them. Since the lockdown, however, the man they call ‘SKY’ has been the only other batter to have married consistency with strike rate to an extent to match Klaasen.
Surya’s peak overlapped with Klaasen’s, but he has been out of action this year. Across 2022 and 2023, Surya’s 2,841 runs came at 171. This includes, across two IPL seasons, 908 runs at 168, but it is really his international record that sets him apart from the others.
There, he averages 45.55 while striking at 172 over for his 2,141 runs. No one from a Full Member nation has a higher strike rate even if one reduces the cut-off to a fifth of Surya’s. And no one from the same teams has a better average while striking at even 140.
In 2022 alone, he made 1,164 runs – one of only two batters to hit four figures in a calendar year – while averaging 46.56 and striking at 187.
Klaasen’s T20I strike rate, while not in Surya’s league, is still an impressive 148, though he averages 22.56. Since the start of 2023, however, he has faced only 21 balls across five innings including a not out. Push the cut-off to the start of 2022, and you get some sort of sample size – 273 runs at 158, but while averaging 22.75.
At his peak, thus, Klaasen can strike with as much aplomb as Surya at his best. However, at international level, he gets out more often than the Indian. In franchise cricket, however, Klaasen at his best holds the edge by his greater exposure to leagues – but that is hardly Surya’s fault.
Conventional knowledge classifies international cricket as the “highest level”, but that is perhaps not as applicable in an era when cricketers forego national contracts for franchise leagues. It must also be remembered that drafts and auctions make the teams as close in quality as possible, reducing the count of weak teams in a league.
However, that debate is better left for another day.
