 "Virat Kohli hits the winning runs that also completes his 51st ODI century during India's Champions Trophy Group A clash against Pakistan in Dubai. AP")
On the eve of the Pakistan game, there was an unusual sight in the huddle of team India’s net session. Usually, it is either captain or coach who addresses the teammates before the final practice session of an international game but captain Rohit Sharma chose to do things differently as it was a high-voltage game against Pakistan. It does not need any reiteration that none understands or handles the pressure of an ODI game like Virat Kohli does.
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So, the former India captain was in his element as he became the motivational guru for the next ten minutes. Judging by his body language, it was not too difficult to understand that he was possibly talking about how to remain unfazed during high-voltage contests between India and Pakistan.
There was only one gesture of him shadow-playing a shot. Else, it was a charged-up Kohli like the one from his high-octane, ultra-aggressive captaincy days.
Kohli: A 50-over GOAT
Whether that special pep-talk helped his teammates or not could be a matter of conjecture. However, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to suggest that it may have fired up the ‘King’, who was due for a ton in a format in which he has been labelled as the greatest by all-time great Ricky Ponting.
“I think I’m on record before saying I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better 50-over player than Virat Kohli,” said the former Australia captain in an ICC podcast.
Hitting an ODI ton has been a ridiculously routine work for Kohli, who scored his 51st on the eve of his 300th ODI game in Dubai . There has only been one instance where Kohli didn’t score a ton in 25 innings – between 15 August 2019 to 7 December 2022, during which his average of 33.52 was nearly half of his phenomenal career average of 58.20.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“We saw against England in the ODIs where he got 50 and there are times where he might have been disappointed by those 50s because he is someone who always posts big runs, especially in the ODI format. He is known to get those hundreds,” Cheteshwar Pujara told this writer in a TV show with CNN-News18 before the Pakistan game.
One of the most venerable cricket writers of all time Peter Roebuck famously said that the real greats are known for their failures while ordinary for their achievements in the context of Sachin Tendulkar’s criticism in India when he was going through one of the rare lean phases of his career. Roebuck’s quote can be used to describe the greatness of Kohli.
Of course, he did not have a great run during the five-match Border-Gavaskar Test series in Australia and it did not help that before the Pakistan game on Sunday, the 36-year-old had scored just one fifty in his last six ODI innings.
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Against this backdrop, it might have looked like one of the five best innings from Kohli in ODI cricket and that is precisely what this writer asked R Ashwin on his Hindi show Ash ki Baat just after the win. “Vimal bhai, are you joking? What are you saying? Forget the top five of Kohli’s knocks, I would just say this was just a fine innings from him”.
Ashwin’s sharp riposte to a seemingly poorly-worded question can be forgiven in the aftermath of a frenzied celebration in the stadium where even Pakistanis were chanting his name and wearing his famous jersey number 18 .
Setting the benchmark for ODI batsmanship like his idol
Kohli’s sets the benchmark for ODI batsmanship like only his idol Tendulkar did. And to rate their hundreds as one of the best is indeed an arduous and awkward exercise as there are far too many of them in their respective illustrious careers. Kohli already has gone past Sachin’s 49 ODI tons and is realistically the only challenger left to go past his career tally of 18,426 runs.
Kohli, though, might find it difficult to equal Tendulkar’s record of six World Cup appearances despite his remarkable fitness standards. Kohli has appeared in four so far and a fifth one in the 2027 edition in South Africa might seem too distant for his critics. Yet there is little doubt that the modern master must not be settling for less.
“It’s crazy when you think about it, isn’t it? Just how good Virat’s been over such a long time, yet he’s still 4,000 runs behind Sachin. I mean, it just goes to show how good Sachin was, but also his longevity in the game. How long Sachin played for and how long you’re able to maintain such high levels as an individual player? And that’s the one thing I’ve always judged excellence on, is how long you can maintain it for,” Ponting said on the realistic possibility of Kohli surpassing Tendulkar as the highest run-getters of all time in ODIs.
Can Kohli surpass Sachin’s ODI run-tally?
Going by India’s FTP (Future tour programmes) till the 2027 ODI World Cup, Kohli may not get more than 30 matches and even if he maintains his phenomenal ODI average that’s just short of 60, he is still likely to fall short of Tendulkar’s magical number by more than 2000 runs.
But what if Kohli is a star performer, like Tendulkar was in his swansong 2011 edition? Will he still chase individual milestones, or will he end on a high, as he did in the 2024 T20 World Cup — something Tendulkar, unfortunately, couldn’t do after the 2011 World Cup win? Subsequently, the road to his iconic 100th hundred somehow took a little longer than anticipated by many because of the enormous burden of expectations.
There was a time when Kohli looked a serious challenger to Tendulkar’s seemingly unbreakable record and then he met his cricketing mortality in the last half-decade across formats.
In pursuing cricketing immortality, can Kohli now think of the 2027 World Cup? The match-winning century in the Champions Trophy showdown against Pakistan might prove to be the catalyst for the long-term aspiration of Kohli who is 18 short of a hundred international hundreds.