Opening batsman Richard Levi took advantage of the small boundaries at Seddon Park to blast a world record 13 sixes and guide South Africa to an eight-wicket win over the Black Caps to level their Twenty20 series in Hamilton, New Zealand, on Sunday.
Levi, who only made his debut on Friday in Wellington, also brought up the fastest international Twenty20 century off 45 balls as he scored 117 not out to help the visitors chase down New Zealand’s 173 for four with four overs to spare.
New Zealand had won the first match of the series in Wellington.
The powerfully-built Levi was brutal to a wayward New Zealand attack, who bowled into his arc allowing him to smash the ball across the ropes from mid-off around to deep backward square-leg.
“It was good fun. Every shot I played seemed to come off,” Levi said in a televised interview. “The leg-side boundary on [one] side of the wicket is fairly short, so I was trying to target it.”
Captain A.B. de Villiers (39 not out) simply ticked the strike over to the 24-year-old, who wasted little time in bringing up his century when he pushed the ball into the covers for a rare single.
West Indies opener Chris Gayle had held the previous record for sixes in a Twenty20 international with 10, while Gayle and Brendon McCullum had shared the record for the fastest century. Both had achieved the mark in 50 balls.
Martin Guptill top-scored for New Zealand with 47 from 35 balls and New Zealand captain McCullum said he felt they had still posted a competitive score.
“We thought we had a chance,” McCullum said. “We would have liked up around that 190 to 200 target, but when someone comes and plays an innings like that there’s not much you can do, so hats off to him.”
“We weren’t allowed to bowl well. I thought Richard played an unbelievable innings,” he said. “It didn’t matter what our bowlers did, they couldn’t pull it back. They tried, but some days you’re beaten to the punch and that was the case today.”
The final match of the Twenty20 series is on Wednesday at Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier