Smriti Mandhana Is the Only Indian Competitor for the ICC Cricketer of the Year Honor at This Time

Smriti Mandhana, a star opening hitter, is the first Indian player—male or female—to be included among the ICC’s nominees for the Cricketer of the Year honour.

Alongside Nat Sciver of England, Amelia Kerr of New Zealand, and Australia opener Beth Mooney, Mandhana will be fighting for the top honours in this event.

The four finalists for the Men’s Cricketer of the Year award are Zimbabwe all-rounder Sikandar Raza, England Test captain Ben Stokes, and New Zealand Test captain Tim Southee. Pakistan’s captain Babar Azam is also among the nominations for this category.

In addition, Stokes is one of the candidates for Test Cricket Player of the Year, along with fellow countryman Jonny Bairstow, the Australian opener Usman Khawaja, and the South African pace bowler Kagiso Rabada.

According to a statement released by the International Cricket Council (ICC), voting for the awards is scheduled to begin the following week. Cricket fans all over the world will have the opportunity to participate in the voting process alongside a specialist ICC Voting Academy made up of prominent cricket media representatives to determine the winners of the 2022 awards.

There is a chance that Mandhana, who took home the Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy as the ICC Women’s Cricketer of the Year in 2021, will do so again in 2022. Mandhana is currently the current holder of the trophy.

For the second year in a row, Mandhana finished as India’s highest run-scorer across all forms since she maintained her dominant form in international cricket.

She shown remarkable skill in the white-ball formats and led India in run scoring in both one-day internationals (ODIs) and Twenty20 internationals (T20Is), finishing with 594 runs and 696 runs, respectively.

This year, Mandhana made her presence known at both the Women’s Cricket World Cup and the Commonwealth Games, which are considered to be the two most important tournaments.

In the latter competition, she was one of the driving forces that helped India advance all the way to the final and win the silver medal in the first-ever Women’s cricket event at the Commonwealth Games. In addition, she was one of the driving factors that helped India win the silver medal.

Stokes is currently in a strong position to win the award for Men’s Cricketer of the Year.

After suffering humbling defeats in the Ashes and the series against West Indies, England were living through a nightmare in terms of their performance in Test cricket.

After Joe Root’s resignation as captain of the Test team, Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, the team’s coach, were given control of the team.

Since that time, Stokes has led England to unprecedented heights, winning nine of the 10 Tests he’s been in charge of since then. In the process, he has racked up 870 runs, including two centuries, and 26 wickets to add to his stat line.

The talismanic all-rounder did not have a particularly successful year with the white ball. In point of fact, he stated that he would no longer play one-day international cricket in order to concentrate on the other formats.

In Twenty20 Internationals, he played nine matches and scored 143 runs while also taking seven wickets. Although the figures may not appear to be significant, England scored 52 of those runs in the final match of the World Cup when they needed it the most.