Lhuan-dre Pretorius breaks Chris Gayle's T20 record with an unbeaten 188 for the Titans

Lhuan-dre Pretorius has made the highest individual score in men's T20 cricket, an unbeaten 188 for the Titans that ends 13 years of the record belonging to Chris Gayle

The 20-year-old left-hander faced 79 balls at Mangaung Oval in Bloemfontein on Friday, hitting 15 fours and 13 sixes in a CSA T20 Challenge match against the Knights.

He finished on 188 not out at a strike rate of 237.97, carrying the Titans to 267 for 3 and past a mark that had stood since the 2013 Indian Premier League.

The Knights were bowled out for 143 in reply and lost by 124 runs.

Fifty in 24 balls, a hundred in 40

Pretorius opened the batting, scored from the first over and never slowed. He reached fifty from 24 balls, his hundred from 40 and 150 from 58.

That last landmark left him 38 runs from his final 21 deliveries, and he was still there, 12 short of a double century, when the Titans ran out of overs.

Seventy per cent of the Titans' total came from his bat. No other batter in the innings reached fifty, and none was required to.

He had returned to the side only recently after an injury layoff.

Past a mark that stood since 2013

Gayle's 175 not out for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors in the 2013 Indian Premier League had been the highest score in a men's T20 innings for 13 years.

It survived every edition of the IPL, the Big Bash and the T20 World Cup that followed, and no other batter had come within ten runs of it: the next best scores on the all-time list sit on 164.

The West Indian took 66 balls over his innings, 13 fewer than Pretorius faced, and finished 13 runs short of what the South African managed.

Gayle hit 17 sixes to Pretorius's 13; the younger man made up the difference in fours, with 15 to Gayle's 13.

Knights left with nothing to chase down

A target of 268 was beyond a Knights side that had just conceded more than 13 an over, and the chase never built the platform it needed.

They were dismissed for 143, handing the Titans a win by 124 runs.

The competition runs on through the weekend, with Warriors meeting Lions at St George's Park and Western Province facing South Africa Emerging Players at Newlands among the pool matches on Sunday.

A second landmark inside a month

On 4 September in Windhoek, Pretorius made 101 from 53 balls against Namibia, his maiden T20 international hundred and the youngest century by a batter from a full-member nation.

South Africa posted 228 for 4 in that match and held on to win by 11 runs.

The wicketkeeper-batter was South Africa's leading run-scorer at the 2024 Under-19 World Cup and the leading run-scorer of the 2025 SA20, where he made 397 runs for Paarl Royals at a strike rate of 166.81.

A Rajasthan Royals connection

Rajasthan Royals signed Pretorius during the 2025 Indian Premier League as an injury replacement for Nitish Rana, at a base price of INR 30 lakh.

Indian outlets noted on Friday that the record he has taken from Gayle had been widely expected to fall instead to his Royals team-mate Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, whose own T20 innings this year have been built on the same tempo.

For now it belongs to a 20-year-old who, a month ago, had not scored an international century.

Scorecard: Titans 267 for 3 (Lhuan-dre Pretorius 188 not out) beat Knights 143 by 124 runs at Mangaung Oval, Bloemfontein.

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