Who has scored the most runs in T20 history? It is a question that has had the same answer for more than a decade. As soon as Chris Gayle overtook Brad Hodge at the top of this list in 2014, he pulled away from the chasing pack and built such a formidable record that his status looked impregnable: nobody else would ever come close.
But aged 42, Gayle quietly slipped away from the franchise circuit and has not returned. He has never officially retired and occasionally still pops up in "legends" tournaments, but the life and soul of the T20 party has made his French exit in the form of a 31-ball 33 for Fortune Barishal in the 2022 Bangladesh Premier League final.
If Gayle's final tally - 14,562 runs - once looked insurmountable, then so too did Fred Trueman's total of 307 Test wickets. It has taken three years for any serious contenders for Gayle's mantle to emerge, but the gap has started to close: there are now three men within 1000 runs of his record, and two of them have a realistic chance of catching him soon.
Shoaib Malik was the closest challenger for many years, without ever quite living up to that status. He and compatriot Babar Azam are the only two men with 10,000 T20 runs at a strike rate below 130, and at 43, age is working against Malik. After 14 runs in two appearances in the PSL this year, his race appears to be run.
Instead, the man who knocks Gayle off his perch is likely to be either Kieron Pollard or Alex Hales, who have been trading second place in the all-time list. Both men are around 800 runs behind and still playing regularly: barring injuries or sudden retirements, they should both surpass Gayle's tally within the next year.
Their case is helped by the ICC's decision to grant T20 status to several new leagues, including MLC, which has enabled players to gobble up relatively easy runs. In fact, Hales would be nearly 500 runs closer to Gayle's tally if the inaugural edition of the ILT20 counted towards his career stats; instead, it was not until the league's second season that it attained full recognition.
But it would be churlish to play down the significance of the record. Clearly, not all T20 runs are worth the same - Hales will rightly value his 86 not out against India in a World Cup semi-final above the same score for Galle Marvels in last year's LPL - but career achievements like this are impossible without a combination of resilience and skill.
Pollard's playing career is gradually winding down, but he is still a regular for Mumbai Indians' teams outside of India and for his home franchise, Trinbago Knight Riders in the CPL. He has been a batting coach with MI for the last three IPL seasons, but could doubtless have been a useful finisher for another franchise if he had desired.
He would be a fitting replacement for Gayle, a fellow West Indian power-hitter with remarkable longevity. If anything, Pollard has been even more of a trailblazer: while Gayle's cricketing legacy was already secured by his international career, Pollard has become an undisputed great of the T20 era thanks principally to the franchise world.
But Pollard's race is made tougher by the fact he bats in the middle order: he has already played over 700 matches, more than 100 greater than anyone else in the world, but the number of balls he faces in each of them is limited by his specialist role. The same is not true for Hales: like Gayle, he has a blank canvas of 120 balls in front of him every time he walks out to open an innings.
Hales is an underappreciated T20 batter, as demonstrated by his omission from the Cricket Monthly's list of the format's top 25 players. He never made a mark on the IPL, but has played in just about every league in the world since quitting first-class cricket. If Gayle was the king of the six, Hales is a fours man: last week in Dallas, he became the first T20 batter to hit 1500 of them.
Hales quit English cricket earlier this year to take up contracts with Knight Riders in MLC and the CPL, and so will not have the chance to close the gap to Gayle by playing in the T20 Blast or in the Hundred (which has T20 status). But there are still fewer breaks in his calendar than Pollard's: expect him to emerge as the new leader at some stage in the 2025-26 season.
Virat Kohli's scope to challenge Gayle is limited by the fact that he now only plays T20 cricket for two months of the year; his record is made extraordinary by the fact his runs have been scored almost exclusively in the IPL and T20Is. David Warner is not far behind, while a handful of tournaments in which he is near his best would throw Jos Buttler back into the mix.
But the man who could catapult past all of those names and a bunch of others and set a new benchmark at the top is another West Indian left-hander. Nicholas Pooran played 76 T20 matches in 2024, a record for a calendar year, and his international retirement may open up scope for him to play even more: he will miss out on some T20I caps, but could feasibly play even more in franchise leagues.
Pooran is yet to reach even 10,000 T20 runs, but at 29, he could have another decade of run-scoring ahead of him. My personal prediction is that he will cruise past Gayle and become the first man to hit the landmark of 20,000 runs; and that in 20 years' time, we will be asking whether anyone will ever go past him.
The explosion of the T20 circuit means that these numbers may come to seem paltry in years to come, but one of Gayle's records will endure. His 22 centuries remain twice as many as the nearest challenger (Babar), and reflect a player whose unique method is out of kilter with the modern trend of all-out attack throughout an innings.