Unleash the Hale Record-holder Alex: My 171 was amazing, but I can’t wait to silence India and fans
RECORD-BREAKER Alex Hales has warned that England are still driving hard to raise the bar in limited-overs cricket.
Hales, who returns to international duty in India this month after opting out of the tour of Bangladesh on security grounds, had the statisticians scrambling for their notebooks last summer.
Although he was oblivious to it at the time, Hales set a new England individual high score of 171 at Trent Bridge.
The 444-3 piled up against Pakistan that August afternoon surpassed the previous best 50-over team total held by Sri Lanka for 10 years.
Hales, 28, admitted: “It was an incredible achievement in any career.
“Setting records, either as an individual or a team, gives you something to remember for the rest of your life, and once the dust settled it was an unbelievably special feeling.”
The Nottinghamshire star is also the only England batsman to have hit a Twenty20 international hundred, and holds three of the highest scores for his country in that format.
But he is looking to continue pushing the limits of what is possible, believing he has only just established himself on the biggest stage. He added: “I have shown I can play against the best players in the world, albeit in different formats, but something I have kept in the back of my mind is that it took me 23-24 ODIs to get my first hundred.
“I averaged just over 20 in the first half of my career, so it shows it took quite a bit of time for me to find my feet in that format.”
That average is up to 37.77, in fact, following a glut of 743 runs in 2016.
And Hales is expecting the chance for England’s batsmen to gorge themselves in three ODIs and three Twenty20s against Virat Kohli’s men, having experienced the run- rich pitches and fervent atmospheres of the subcontinent in last year’s run to the World Twenty20
Final.