Navgire finished on a 35-ball 106 for Maharashtra against Punjab in the Women’s T20 Trophy on Friday

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Kiran Navgire, the India and Maharashtra opener, has smashed the record for fastest hundred in women’s T20s. She hit her record-breaking blitz in the Women’s T20 Trophy on Friday, hammering a 34-ball century while finishing on a 35-ball 106. It helped Maharashtra crush Punjab with eight overs to spare in Nagpur.

Navgire broke Sophie Devine’s record for the previous fastest women’s T20 century, in 36 balls. That came in Wellington’s ten-wicket win over Otago in January 2021 where Devine scored 108 not out in 38 balls. An incredible strike-rate of 302.86 makes Navgire’s performance the only women’s T20 century to have a 300-plus strike-rate.

It was all one-way action from Navgire’s bat. In the unbeaten 103-run second-wicket partnership, No. 3 Mukta Magre needed to contribute only six runs as Navgire plundered 14 fours and seven sixes. Maharashtra’s team total of 113 for 1 – the chase completed in eight overs – is now the lowest total to include an individual hundred in women’s T20s, going above the previous lowest of 123 in a CSA T20 game where Annerie Dercksen scored 106 not out.

Navgire, from Mire in Maharashtra’s Solapur district – nearly 200km south-east of Pune – first turned heads during the 2022 edition of the Women’s T20 Trophy, when she smashed 35 sixes for Nagaland. She also became the first Indian to hit a 150-plus score in a women’s T20 match during her 76-ball 162 against Arunachal Pradesh. In an interview to ESPNcricinfo, she said she wanted to bat like MS Dhoni and credited much of her strength from helping out on her family’s farm as a child and from the variety of sports she played growing up.

Her big-hitting exploits earned her an India T20I debut in Chester Le-Street against England in 2022, but she has not found a place in the national side since the Women’s Asia Cup of October 2022. In her six outings for India, she has batted four times, cumulatively scoring 17 runs across 19 balls, with one not out.

In the WPL, she has been a regular at UP Warriorz, scoring 419 runs in 24 innings across three seasons. Her WPL strike-rate is 140.13, but she has averaged less than 18.