ICC Player of the Month: Nepal’s Kushal Bhurtel competes with Babar Azam and Fakhar Zaman

The International Cricket Council announced nominations of the Player of the Month Award and it surprised many as for the first time ever, a member of the associate nation, Kushal Bhurtel of Nepal was among the three nominees.

While Bhurtel was the star of the show in the tri-nation T20I series hosted by Nepal in April where they defeated the Netherlands in the final to lift the trophy, Babar and Fakhar hammered the South Africans in both the ODIs and T20Is to record historic series wins against South Africa in both the formats.

Bhurtel, 24, scored 278 runs including four fifties in the five games that he played against in the tri-nation series hosted at Kiritpur. The right-hander averaged a phenomenal 69.50 at a strike rate of 140 in the series. The third team in the tri-series was Malaysia.

Babar, 26, on the other hand, was brilliant with the bat as well, scoring 228 runs in three ODIs including a century at an average of 76 and 305 T20I runs in seven innings at an average of 43.57. His fellow compatriot Zaman, 30, played a historic knock of 193, the second-highest individual score in an ODI while chasing at Johannesburg. He followed that with another century in Centurion in the very next game helping Pakistan win the ODI series 2-1.

The previous three winners of the ICC Men’s Player of the Month have all been Indians and it includes the likes of Rishabh Pant, Ravichandran Ashwin and Bhuvaneshwar Kumar.

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