Sports Desk: New Zealand’s Kane Williamson set a new record for the most runs scored by a captain at a World Cup when he made 30 against England in the final at Lord’s on Sunday.

It took Williamson just one run to put his name in the record book as he surpassed Sri Lanka’s Mahela Jayawardene in the final.

Jayawardene scored 548 runs in 2007 and Williamson came into the final with identical number of runs after his laborious 67 runs in the semi-final against India at Old Trafford.

He struggled to get off the mark and took as many as 12 balls to score his first run with a single off Jofra Archer but it was enough for him to get the record.

Williamson could not finish his innings the way he would have preferred in the final as he gave a catch off Liam Plunkett to the back when he was just starting to feel set in the middle.

He ended the tournament with 578 runs, leading the other successful captains in World Cup, which also included Ricky Ponting (539 runs in 2007) and Aaron Finch

(507 runs in 2019), by some distance.

His total run in the tournament was remarkable because they roughly accounted 30 per cent of New Zealand’s total runs.

His feat was further remarkable because they came for a side, who did not score 300 runs on a single occasion in World Cup 2019 and had only a 4.99 run rate per over before the final, lowest of all teams bar Afghanistan.

Williamson had just two centuries leading into the final – an unbeaten 106 against South Africa and 148 against New Zealand – but they both came in match-winning causes and in tight games.

Apart from Bangladesh‘s Sakib al Hasan no other player had to drag his team alone like Williamson, meaning World Cup or not he would leave the tournament on a high.