Sports Desk:

Till Sri Lanka’s Maheesh Theekshana rolled up to bowl the second delivery of the fourth over in the third T20I last Wednesday, Bangladesh opener Tanzid Hasan Tamim was going through a six-hitting rut.

The opener had gone without clearing the ropes in his last four innings, which for most Bangladeshi batters would not seem long enough to be termed as a rut, but for Tanzid, who had hit at least one maximum in his last nine white-ball innings for the Tigers, this was sufficient.

Standing at five feet and eight inches, with an athletic but lean build, Tanzid does not really fit the bill of what a six-hitting menace in T20s should look like.

But looks can be deceiving, as stats show that in the running year, the southpaw from Bangladesh has been one of the most consistent six-hitters in world cricket.

In all competitive T20s since January 2025, including the third T20I against Sri Lanka, Tanzid has hit 55 sixes in just 20 innings, the highest among Bangladeshis and the eighth most in the world.

In T20Is, his stats look even better, as in nine innings he has smashed 21 sixes, second-highest among all Test-playing nations behind India’s Abhishek Sharma and New Zealand’s Tim Seifert, who have 22 sixes apiece.

Parvez Hossain Emon, Tanzid’s current opening partner in both white-ball formats for the Tigers, is the second among Bangladeshis in both the T20 and T20I lists. Emon has hit 37 sixes in 20 T20 innings, the same number of outings as Tanzid, and 14 in eight T20I knocks.

The fact that Tanzid leads Emon by 18 sixes in the T20 list and by seven in T20Is is a bit surprising considering the differences in their batting style.

While Tanzid is more like the conventional left-handed opener, dependent more on his natural flair, intrinsic timing, and picking gaps, Emon is a bottom-handed batter, who relies on brute force to bludgeon the ball across the ropes or at least hit it high enough to take advantage of the early field restrictions.

Considering the direction the art of batting is moving at the moment, Emon’s approach is more in line with the times’ need.

Young batters worldwide are leaning more towards learning the skill of muscling the ball over the ropes, as with the proliferation of T20 and T10 leagues, there is more money to be made by learning how to hit sixes in command.

But where many batters falter, especially in Bangladesh, is that swinging at every ball from the hips like baseball is not the only way to hit sixes.

“You don’t need just big muscles or power to hit sixes,” Rohit Sharma, former India captain and the person with the most sixes in T20Is (205), said this back in 2019, after hitting a match-winning 43-ball 85 against Bangladesh in a T20I in which he hit Mosaddek Hossain for a hattrick of maximums.

“You need timing, and you need to hit it from the middle, your head should be still, your body needs to be in the right position. When you take care of these things on a good wicket, you will be able to hit sixes,” he added.

From the looks of it, Tanzid follows Rohit’s school of thought, as the left-hander kept his head steady, got in position early, transferred the weight at the precise moment, struck the ball at the perfect spot, and extended his follow-through just enough to end his six-hitting rut with an exquisite lofted cover drive.

That one shot opened the floodgates in Colombo, as Tanzid hit five more sixes, all against spinners, all conventional shots, zero wild hoicks. His six sixes paved the way to a maiden series win for the Tigers and showed that even now, the old principles of batsmanship hold merit.

For Tanzid and Bangladesh, the next challenge is the three home T20Is against Pakistan starting on Sunday, and it would be interesting to see whether the opener adds to his six-hitting streak in the series or falls victim to the mercurial Mirpur pitch.