Asia Cup 2023 is less than two months away. The tournament which will feature teams like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Afghanistan will take place from August 31 to September 17. Earlier, the entire tournament was to be held in Pakistan, but the BCCI refused to travel to the neighboring country. For security reasons. Asia Cup will now be played in two countries Pakistan and Sri Lanka. While nine games including the final will be hosted by Sri Lanka. Pakistan will get to host four matches.
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India has won the Asia Cup the maximum number of times. Team India has won the tournament a record 7 times, followed by Sri Lanka, who have won the title 6 times in 15 editions. But do you know who has scored the most runs in the Asia Cup? The answer is not Sachin Tendulkar, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Saeed Anwar, Kumar Sangakkara or Sourav Ganguly. Even the modern legends like MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma have not been able to score the most runs in the tournament.
The highest run scorer in Asia Cup 2023 is former Sri Lanka opener Sanath Jayasuriya. The destructive top-order batsman from the island nation has scored a total of 1,220 runs in 25 matches and 24 innings. He achieved this feat at an impressive average of 53.04 and strike rate of 102.52. He has scored 6 centuries and 3 fifties in the Asia Cup. Not to forget, these are figures for the ODI editions of the tournament.
Golden opener Sanath Jayasuriya _ played a strong innings of 1__3__0__ (134) against India in the 11th match of Asia Cup 2004, falling just 4 runs short of victory _#acc #Cricket #cricket love #asiacup pic.twitter.com/KtcBUpFDss
– Asian Cricket Council (@ACCMedia1) 12 July 2022
There is also a Sri Lankan at number two in this list. He is Kumar Sangakkara, who has 1,075 runs in 23 innings, followed by India great Sachin Tendulkar, who has scored 971 runs in 21 innings. There is only one Pakistani batsman in the top 5 of the highest run-scorers in Asia Cup ODI editions, and that is Shoaib Malik, who has scored 786 runs in 15 innings. At number two is India captain Rohit Sharma, who has scored 754 runs in 21 innings.
Kohli has scored 613 runs in 10 innings at an average of 61.30 and despite such good figures, he is not even among the top 10 best batsmen in terms of runs in the Asia Cup. Dhoni is at number 9 in this list with 648 runs in 16 innings. Rohit will need 476 runs to overtake Jayasuriya to become the highest run-scorer in the tournament. This can happen only if he scores at least four hundreds in the tournament, which is a rare occurrence these days.