Yashasvi Jaiswal Hit 12 Sixes in a Test Double Century

In the Rajkot Test of February 2024, Yashasvi Jaiswal made 214 not out against England and hit twelve sixes doing it. That is the most sixes any Indian has struck in a Test innings, and it equals the most anyone has, alongside Wasim Akram. He was twenty-two, it was his second double hundred in consecutive Tests, and he had scored 209 in Visakhapatnam a fortnight earlier.

The conventional story about a young Indian batter in the 2020s runs the other way: a T20 player, made in the Indian Premier League, who then has to be taught how to bat for a day. Jaiswal inverts it. His most aggressive cricket has been played in the longest format, and his franchise record — good, not exceptional — is the more measured half of his career.

The series that established him

Jaiswal made 712 runs in five Tests against England in early 2024, at an average near 89, and was Player of the Series. The two double centuries came back to back. Only Vinod Kambli and Virat Kohli had done that for India before, and at twenty-two Jaiswal became one of the youngest batters in the game's history to record two Test double hundreds — behind only Donald Bradman and Kambli on age.

He had begun the previous year with 171 on Test debut against the West Indies at Roseau, which is the sort of start that fixes expectations unhelpfully high. The England series then delivered on them at once. He has since built a Test record of 28 matches at an average a shade under 49 with seven hundreds, which is among the best returns any Indian opener has produced across a comparable early career.

The twelve sixes and what they actually mean

It is worth being precise about why the Rajkot innings matters beyond the record. A Test double century is normally a monument to patience: an opener bats six hours, leaves everything outside off stump, and takes his runs in ones and twos and the occasional drive. Jaiswal batted for a long time as well — the innings was unbeaten and substantial — but a quarter of his runs came in sixes, most of them hit over long-on and long-off against spin, including off the debutant Shoaib Bashir.

That combination, duration plus elevation, is rare. It suggests a batter whose default response to a spinner turning the ball into him on a fourth-day pitch is to hit over the top rather than defend, and who is willing to keep doing it for hours without the risk accumulating into a dismissal. He reached his hundred in the previous Test by walking down the pitch and lifting the ball over long-on, which is the same instinct in miniature.

The most sixes in an India Test innings reckoning contains a great many innings with none at all. Jaiswal's twelve in one is a genuine outlier in the country's Test history.

The franchise record, which is quieter

Jaiswal's Rajasthan Royals career runs to 82 innings for 2,593 runs at 33.68 and a strike rate of 152.80, with two hundreds and eighteen fifties. His best season was 2023: 625 runs in fourteen innings at a strike rate of 163.61, with 82 fours and 26 sixes.

The strike rate places him ninth on the best batting strike rate list among substantial careers, and the shape of his scoring is distinctive: 311 fours against 110 sixes, with 73.4 per cent of his runs coming in boundaries. That is a boundary-heavy game built on fours rather than sixes, which is the opposite of the Rajkot innings and tells you something about how he adapts. In a twenty-over match he takes the percentage option, hitting through the line into gaps; in a Test, with time available, he takes the risk.

He is also one of the competition's most effective powerplay batters, with 1,680 runs in the first six overs at a strike rate of 158.9, which the powerplay runs list records among the higher rates for that phase. His 124 from 62 balls against Mumbai Indians at Wankhede on 30 April 2023 anchored a successful chase of 213, and he made 98 from 47 against Kolkata a fortnight later.

Where he came from, and why it is relevant

Jaiswal left Suriyawan in Uttar Pradesh at around ten to pursue cricket in Mumbai, and for a period he lived in a tent at Azad Maidan alongside the groundstaff, selling pani puri to support himself. There was no electricity or plumbing; he queued for public toilets at the railway terminus. He was taken in and coached by Jwala Singh, and worked his way through Mumbai's age-group system into the Ranji Trophy.

This is now the most-told story about him, and there is a risk in repeating it: hardship narratives tend to explain a player's determination and nothing about his cricket. The cricketing point is narrower. Jaiswal learned to bat on Mumbai's maidans, inside a system whose entire culture is built on occupying the crease — the tradition that has made Mumbai the most successful side in Ranji Trophy history and produced more Indian Test batters than any other state. A twenty-two-year-old who can bat six hours and hit twelve sixes while doing it is that schooling meeting a generation raised on T20 scoring rates, and he may be the first clear example of the combination.

He also arrived with the weight of runs the pathway demands. In October 2019, at 17 years and 292 days, he made 203 from 153 balls against Jharkhand in a Vijay Hazare Trophy match at Bengaluru, becoming the youngest player in the history of the game to score a List A double century and breaking the previous mark by nearly three years.

That innings contained twelve sixes, which was then a record for the tournament. Five years before Rajkot, in a fifty-over domestic game, a seventeen-year-old had already produced the exact signature: a double century with twelve sixes in it. He did not force his way into Test cricket through the IPL. He forced his way in the old way, and the franchise contract followed.

The one place the aggression has cost him

The counter-evidence to all of this is Australia, and it should be stated. Jaiswal's tour there produced the kind of scores that expose the method's edges: an opener who looks to hit over the top and drive on the up against fast bowling on a hard surface with a fourth and fifth slip in place will find that the same shot that clears long-on at Rajkot goes to gully in Perth.

The pattern that has drawn most comment is his dismissal to the ball angled across him outside off stump, a plan that visiting attacks have set for him repeatedly and that produced results before he adjusted. This is the ordinary apprenticeship of a young opener and every good one has served it — Virender Sehwag, whose method Jaiswal has been compared to more than any other Indian's, spent his first three years being told the same thing.

What matters for the argument here is that the method is not indiscriminate. The evidence from the England series is that he calibrates: against spin on a turning pitch, elevation is the low-risk option and he takes it; against pace and movement, the same shot is the high-risk one, and the record of him learning that in real time is what the next three years will show.

What has not been settled

Two things about Jaiswal's record remain open, and it would be dishonest to write around them.

The first is one-day cricket. He has played only a handful of fifty-over internationals, which means the format where his combination of patience and power should be most valuable is the one he has barely been tried in. India's ODI top order has been settled and successful, and there has been no obvious slot. The comparison of his record with Shubman Gill's sets that divergence out in detail.

The second is consistency. A Test average near 49 across 28 matches is excellent; it is also built on a small number of enormous innings, with the England series accounting for a substantial share of the total. Openers who score in that pattern can look either like the next great one or like a batter having a very good year, and twenty-eight Tests is not enough of a sample to know which. His move to Goa for the 2025-26 domestic season, after years with Mumbai, was a reminder that the career is still being organised.

The claim worth making

Jaiswal is not yet a great player, and it is too early for anybody to say he will be. What his record already supports is more specific: he is the clearest evidence available that the transfer between formats can run backwards. The received wisdom of the last fifteen years has been that T20 scoring rates leak into Test cricket and make batters reckless. Jaiswal's Test cricket is more aggressive than his T20 cricket, and it has produced two double hundreds rather than a series of collapses.

That suggests the leakage was never the problem. The problem was batters who could only play one way. A twenty-two-year-old hitting twelve sixes in an unbeaten 214 had two methods available and chose the right one for the surface in front of him. Career figures are on the Yashasvi Jaiswal profile.