Photo credit: Surrey Cricket/Twitter

After yet another blazing knock in England's domestic T20 competition, Aaron Finch emerged as this year's leading T20 run scorer after he stormed to his third century from his last T20 matches on Friday.

The hard-hitting Aussie scored an unbeaten 117 against Middlesex off just 52 balls, peppered with 11 fours and 8 sixes, and made little work of Middlesex's 221 in their Vitality Blast London derby match at the Oval. Surrey reached their target in just 16 overs, helped with Jason Roy pillaging runs off the other end, with nine wickets to spare.

Finch plundered with a strike rate of 225, and raised his hundred off a six in just 45 balls and his fifty off just 16, the latter a record for the county. His 194-run opening partnership with Roy was also a record for Surrey, surpassing their own milestone set two years ago.

"We got off to a flying start but we looked up and we still needed 10 runs per over after four or five overs, so we knew we needed to keep pushing the game as quickly as we could to give us some options at the back end," Finch explained the assault, which started off with him hitting a six off the first ball he faced.

Unsurprisingly, the Australian T20 captain tops the run-scoring charts in the series, having scored 462 runs at an astonishing average of 154 from his six innings, including two unbeaten centuries and two fifties.

The Kings XI Punjab batsman has now scored 1,156 runs in T20s so far this year, at an average of 57.80 and averages 106.5 in his last 12 T20 matches, that includes the record knock of 172 against Zimbabwe.

Incidentally, while Finch leads the highest run-getters in T20s this year, compatriot and fellow KXIP star Andrew Tye remains as the top wicket-taker in the format in 2018, his 60 scalps just four more than Rashid Khan.