Most wickets taken in a Twenty20 cricket match

Leicestershire Foxes skipper Colin Ackermann (South Africa) was the first cricketer to take seven wickets in a professional Twenty20 match when he returned figures of 7 for 18 from four overs in a Vitality Blast – North Group match against the Birmingham Bears at the Fischer County Ground in Leicester, UK, on 7 August 2019.

Previously, 31 players had taken six wickets in a Twenty20 (T20) match on 33 separate occasions (Ajantha Mendis and Shakib Al Hasan have done it twice). Ackermann was the first player to take as many as seven wickets in a single innings.

Ackermann was only the third captain to take at least six wickets in a T20 match, after Al Hasan’s 6 for 18 for Prime Bank Cricket Club (Bangladesh) in 2013 and Tim Bresnan’s 6 for 19 for Yorkshire in 2017.

The previous best bowling figures in a T20 match was Arul Suppiah’s 6 for 5 from 3.4 overs for Somerset against Glamorgan in the same UK competition (then called the Friends Life T20) on 5 July 2011.

After taking the wicket of Michael Burgess in his first over, Ackermann dismissed Will Rhodes (bowling figures at the time: 2 for 13), Liam Banks (3 for 15) and Alex Thomson (4 for 15) in his third over, and Bears top-scorer Sam Hain (5 for 15), Henry Brookes (6 for 17) and visiting captain Jeetan Patel (7 for 18) in his fourth over, with his last six scalps coming in the space of 12 balls as the Bears subsided to 134 all out in 17.4 overs in reply to the Foxes’ 20-over score of 189 for 6.

Ackermann precipitated a Birmingham collapse from 118 for 3 after 14 overs to 134 for 9 after 17 overs. He bowled 12 dot (no runs) balls in his 24-ball spell.