Aman Mokhade’s purple patch shows no sign of fading. The Vidarbha opener reached 1,000 List-A runs in just his 16th innings on Tuesday, matching Graeme Pollock’s long-standing benchmark and shaving an innings off the previous Indian best held jointly by Devdutt Padikkal and Abhinav Mukund.
The milestone arrived in the Vijay Hazare Trophy semi-final at the Centre of Excellence, Bengaluru, where Mokhade’s 138 from 122 balls underpinned a six-wicket win over Karnataka. The 24-year-old now stands on 781 runs from nine knocks in this tournament alone, averaging 97.62 with five centuries and a fifty. Those five hundreds equal the most by any batter in a single Vijay Hazare season.
This surge has felt sudden, though the foundations were laid last year. After debuting back in 2022-23, Mokhade spent two seasons on the fringes. Since October, however, he has reeled off scores almost at will: 577 runs at 96.16 in the first block of the Ranji Trophy, then a team-leading return in the Syed Mushtaq Ali, and now the headline numbers in 50-over cricket.
Runs in this Hazare campaign have arrived in clusters. He opened with 110 against Bengal, added 82 versus Hyderabad and 139 against Jammu & Kashmir, then, after a rare failure against Chandigarh, bounced back with tons against Baroda, Uttar Pradesh and now Karnataka. Vidarbha, still chasing a first Vijay Hazare crown, are one match away from making that stick.
Coaches around the circuit point to a tightened defensive game and an expanded off-side range. Karnataka’s bowling coach was heard saying afterwards that Mokhade “keeps making the straight boundary feel small”, though he declined formal interview. Vidarbha skipper Faiz Fazal, speaking at the presentation, called the innings “as good as any I’ve seen at domestic level”.
No one inside the ground seemed in doubt. Each time Mokhade drove through extra cover, the small afternoon crowd rose in the same half-believing way. For them, and perhaps even for Mokhade himself, this run of form is new territory. The final now beckons; so does the possibility of finishing a season that began quietly with a place in the record books guaranteed.
