Indian cricketer Rohit Sharma tore up the record books on Thursday with an astonishing innings of 264 for India against Sri Lanka in Kolkata.
Opening bat Sharma faced 173 balls and scored 33 fours and nine sixes on his way to the highest ever score in a one-day international, as India made a mammoth score of 404-5 from their 50 overs. Sharma was finally out to the last ball of the innings, caught at long-off as he went for a boundary that would have equalled the highest ever score in any form of limited overs cricket: Ali Brown's 268 for Surrey against Glamorgan in 2002.
Sharma began slowly, and even played out a maiden early in the innings. But by the end his batting had become "cartoonish", according to Andrew Fidel Fernando of Cricinfo.com. "There was no shot he had not played. No part of the ground he had not exploited. No bowler who escaped his brutality."
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After taking 72 balls to get to 50 he went from 51 to 250 in 94 balls with shots that "seemed in open defiance of physics".
On the way to a score of 264 Sharma:
- became the first batsman to score 250 in a one-day international, beating the previous record, set by Virendar Sehwag against Australia in 2011, by 45 runs
- became the first cricketer to have registered two one-day double-hundreds, following up an innings of 209 against Australia last year
- scored only the fourth-ever double hundred in one-day internationals
- set the highest ever score by an Indian in one-day cricket, beating Shikhar Dhawan's 248 against South Africa A in 2013
- hit the highest number of fours in an innings, 33, beating the previous record of 25 jointly held by Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar
- scored the most runs with boundaries in an ODI innings, hitting 186 in fours and sixes
- made the second-highest score in a List A match, falling four short of Ali Brown's record
