Cricket is a sport that people often tend to love or hate. The long-form nature of Test cricket means that many can’t invest the amount of time needed to watch it to truly call themselves fans, whilst also tending to push away those that find it boring.

Whilst the advent of the likes of T20 cricket and The Hundred came about to appeal to those people, it still struggles to win over new audiences in an age when social media platforms offer an immediate dopamine hit.

That is what the six in cricket offers: a chance to celebrate immediately. The question is, which cricketers have hit the most?

Focussing on International Stats

It is fair to say that there are numerous different types of cricket.

The original one is Test cricket, which has been around for hundreds of years and won’t be going anywhere any time soon. Then there are One Day Internationals, often referred to as ODIs, which have also been around for some time and give nations a chance to test themselves against one another in a shorter-form version of the sport than Test cricket can offer. Finally, at least as far as we’re concerned, comes T20, which involves each side having 20 overs with which to rack up the highest score possible.

We will be looking at international cricket only, largely because the stats for other forms of the sport are much more difficult to come by. If you happen to know that a cricketer has hit 3,000 sixes for Lancashire, say, then that’s great, but they’re not going to be included on our list.

Instead, we’re looking at the top five cricketers who have managed to hit the most sixes ever on the international stage in Test, ODI and T20 cricket variations:

Taking a Closer Look at the Cricketers

Now we’ve identified the cricketers that have been able to hit the ball out for sixes the most on the international stage, it is worth taking a closer look at each of them to delve deeper into the stats. How many matches have they played in to get those sixes, for example, and what does that make their six-per-match stat?

Rohit Sharma – 637 International Career Sixes

If you want to know something scary about Rohit Sharma from the point of view of anyone who would like to try to catch up with him in terms of sixes hit, it is that he is still playing the game at the time of writing. In other words, the number of sixes to his name might end up increasing in the years to come. Born in the Indian city of Nagpur on the 30th of April 1987, Rohit Gurunath Sharma was raised by his grandparents on account of the fact that his father earned a relatively low income. His uncle’s money allowed him to join a cricket camp in 1999, where he met Dinesh Lad.

@husainedits1 HITMAN 🗿☠️❤️‍🔥 🎶 #rohitsharma #fyp #foruyou #foruyoupage #goviral #unfreeze #cricket #batting #crazycricket #unfreezemyacount #1millionaudition #1m #100k #repost #support ♬ original sound – 𝐴𝑁𝐼𝑆𝐴 𝑆𝐿𝑂𝑊𝐸𝐷 ꨄ︎

Lad helped him to get a scholarship to Swami Vivekanand International School, where he taught, believing it had better facilities. He started off as an off-spin bowler with decent batting skills, but Lad noticed his ability with the bat in his hand and coached him to become better. He scored a century in his opener in the Harris and Giles Shield, a school cricket tournament, never looking back from there. His Test cricket debut for India came in the November of 2013, scoring 177 against the West Indies, which was the second-highest total ever scored by an Indian cricketer on their debut.

• 637 Sixes in 499 Matches = 1.27 Sixes per Match

Chris Gayle – 553 International Career Sixes

Christopher Henry Gayle was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on the 21st of September 1979. His cricketing life began with Lucas Cricket Club in his hometown, with Gayle later claiming that if it hadn’t been for the club, then he might well have ended up ‘on the streets’, such is the extent to which it changed his life. His ability as a player meant that the club decided to rename the nursery in his honour. His first appearance on the international stage came in the 1998 Under-19s Cricket World Cup, feint well enough to mean that he got his first-class debut for Jamaica later that year.

I have never seen anything like what Chris Gayle is doing right now. Absolutely ridiculous cricket.

— Gavin Wilson (@gavwilson.com) Jan 21, 2025 at 11:36

From there, things moved quickly for Gayle. He played his first One Day International the following year, then six months after that appeared in a Test match for the first time. He soon established himself as a destructive force with the bat, being incredibly effective when playing square of the wicket. His first century came in the July of 2001 when he scored 175 against Zimbabwe. In the years that followed, he rose through the ranks and came to be considered as one of the best batsmen in the sport. This is in spite of the fact that he underwent heart surgery in 2005.

• 553 Sixes in 483 Matches = 1.14 Sixes per Match

Shahid Afridi – 476 International Career Sixes

Born in Tirah in Pakistan on the first of March 1977, Sahibzada Mohammad Shahid Khan Afridi, to give him his full name, belonged to a family of spiritual masters and has six brothers and five sisters. The fifth-oldest of his siblings, he was introduced to cricket by his Pakistani Army colonel uncle. Inspired by the stories of Imran Khan’s captaincy of the cricket team in the 1990s, he performed well at Under-19 level and was drafted into the Pakistan senior team as a result. He managed 42 wickets in five matches for the Karachi Whites, also gaining some first-class experience at youth level.

Early on in his career, he was drafted into the Pakistan ODI Team after Mushtaq Ahmed picked up an injury. It took until his following match before he got the chance to bat, breaking the record for the fastest century in ODI cricket. From there, he never really looked back. Over the years that followed, Afridi continued to prove himself with both bat and ball. In the March of 2005, for example, he played in a Test match against India and scored a quick half-century in the second innings as well as taking five wickets to help his side register a draw in the series.

• 476 Sixes in 524 Matches = 1.10 Sixes per Match

Brendon McCullum – 398 International Career Sixes

Brendon Barrie McCullum was born on the 27th of September 1981 in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. When he originally broke into the New Zealand cricket team, he did so as a wicketkeeper-batsman, although his batting alone would have been enough to earn him a place in the Black Caps side. He became the leading run scorer in Twenty20 International cricket, although that was later usurped by someone else, and he also became the first player to rack up 2,000 runs in International T20s. When he scored 302 against India in the February of 2014, that made him the first New Zealander to get a Test triple-hundred.

#OnThisDay: in 2015, Brendon McCullum played last T20 International match for New Zealand hitting four maximum against England at Manchester. pic.twitter.com/I741RXmafd

— 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐬 🇳🇿 (@Kiwiscricketfan) June 23, 2025

In other words, McCullum knows what he’s doing on a cricket pitch. It wasn’t just in international cricket where McCullum knew what he was doing either; he scored 160 for Glamorgan against Leicestershire in 2006 when opening the batting. Having scored 96 against England at Lord’s in 2004, he got his maiden Test century a couple of months later when hitting Bangladesh for 143. His 86 helped New Zealand become the first team to whitewash Australia in a three-match ODI series since 1997 in the February of 2007. He retired from international cricket in 2016 and cricket in general three years later.

• 398 Sixes in 432 Matches = 1.08 Sixes per Match

Martin Guptill – 383 International Career Sixes

Another New Zealand cricketer to make it onto our list is Martin Guptill, who was born in Auckland on the 30th of September 1986. If you want to get a sense of how good a batsman Guptill was on the international stage, you need only look at the fact that he was the first New Zealander to achieve a double-century in a One Day International, which he scored 237 not out. He officially retired from international cricket in the January of 2025, although he hadn’t played for New Zealand sine the October of 2022, making it something of a moot point when he announced his retirement publicly.

@the_eagle0100 M.Guptik 146M Six Check Umpires Reaction 🥵 #martinguptill #cricket #cricketlover #foryou #foryoupage #growmyaccount #dontunderreviewmyvideo #pleaseunfrezzemyaccount ♬ original sound – The _ Eagle

At the age of 13, Guptill was involved in a forklift accident that saw him lose three toes on his left foot, leaving him with just two. Not that that stopped him from becoming a world-class cricketer, representing New Zealand for the first time in the Under-19 Cricket World Cup in Sri Lanka in 2006. His ODI debut came three years later, scoring 122 not out against the West Indies and becoming the first Kiwi to score a century on his debut in the One Day International format. Although he did play Test cricket, he was considered to be a short-form specialist.

• 383 Sixes in 367 Matches = 1.04 Sixes per Match