Cricket's Hall of Fame inducts Dhoni, Mir, Smith, Amla, Hayden, Vettori and Taylor

LONDON (AP) — Two-time world champion Mahendra Singh Dhoni led the 2025 class of seven cricketers into the ICC Hall of Fame on Monday.

He was joined by Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla, South Africa’s most successful captain and second highest test scorer, Matthew Hayden of Australia, Daniel Vettori of New Zealand, Sarah Taylor of England, and Sana Mir, the first woman from Pakistan to be inducted.

“From dreaming as a little girl that one day there would even be a women’s team in our country to now standing here, inducted among the very legends I idolized long before I ever held a bat or a ball, this is a moment I couldn’t have dared to imagine,” Mir said.

Nobody has captained India in more matches than Dhoni. Under his leadership, India won the 2007 T20 World Cup, 2011 ODI World Cup, and topped the test rankings for 18 months in between. He was named to the ODI and T20 world teams of the decade at the end of 2019.

Smith became South Africa’s youngest captain at 22. He led in a world record 109 tests and won 53, including the Proteas’ first series win in Australia in 2008-09 in which he played with a broken hand.

Cricket's Hall of Fame inducts Dhoni, Mir, Smith, Amla, Hayden, Vettori and Taylor | iNFOnews.ca — FILE – Pakistan captain Sana Mir during the ICC Women’s World Cup 2017 match between India and Pakistan at County Ground in Derby, England, Sunday, July 2, 2017. (AP Photo/Rui Vieira, File)

Amla spent 13 hours scoring South Africa’s first triple century, 311 against England at the Oval in 2012. He also rose to No. 1 in the ODI rankings.

Hayden was an opening batter for Australia for 16 years. He briefly took Brian Lara’s test record with 380 against Zimbabwe in Perth, and hit three centuries while winning the 2007 ODI World Cup.

Vettori became the youngest man to debut for New Zealand in tests at 18 in 1997, and the left-arm spinner became only the third man in history to take 300 test wickets and hit 4,000 runs.

Taylor set the standard for women wicketkeepers with a record 232 dismissals across the formats. She was a key contributor in England’s ODI World Cup and T20 World Cup double in 2009 and another ODI World Cup triumph in 2017.

Mir led Pakistan for seven of her 15 years in the team, winning two Asian Games. She started as a pace bowler but a stress fracture forced her to switch to off-spin. She retired as Pakistan’s leading wicket-taker in ODIs and second highest in T20s.