On Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli scored his 50th ODI hundred this week. His 100th run in his 50th ODI century was his 6013th ODI run made in a century. The man whose seemingly unreachable milestone Kohli has crossed thanks to a gargantuan 2023 (1323 runs at 73.5 ave, 99.9 sr, with 6 100s) made 6122 ODI runs in his 49 centuries. Kohli’s average century is 120(109), while Tendulkar’s average ODI century was 125(125) (see this for run inflation due to rule changes in ODIs).

2023 is the 8th calendar year in which Kohli has made alteast 1000 ODI runs, a new record. Tendulkar did it in 7 calendar years. Sangakkara, Ganguly and Ponting did it in 6. Rohit Sharma has done it in 5. No other player has managed it more than four times.

Opponents had dismissed Kohli 234 times in ODIs by the time he reached his 50th ODI hundred (223 times by bowlers, 12 run outs). At the end of the innings, this meant that Kohli had been dismissed 4.9 times per century in ODIs. Look down the list of ODI centurions, and one has to look all the way down the David Malan, who has 6 100s and 26 dismissals in ODIs (4.33 dismissals per century), and Ryan ten Doeschate (29 dismissals for 6 100s, 4.83 dismissals per century) to find a player doing better than Kohli. If trivia is your thing, then Nehal Bibodi of Uganda has 2 centuries (against Denmark and Bermuda) and 2 dismissals in what was then the ICC Trophy in 2009, and is retrospectively classed as ODIs by the ICC.

Apart from those 3, of the 296 batters who have at least 2 ODI centuries, 292 have been dismissed more often per century than Kohli. And, remember, Kohli has more ODI 100s than any other player.

To look through Kohli’s ODI records is to be overcome by an exhausting, relentless catalogue of run gluttony. Look through his dismissals, (we have a catalogue of his 223 dismissals to a bowler in ODI through contemporaneous ball by ball commentary), and they look equally routine. Like every other batter, Kohli is beaten on the outside edge or the inside edge, he’s either too early into the shot, or too late on the shot, he gets leading edges, he misses the ball, he feathers it to the keeper or smashes it to the cover fielder.

And yet, in among those dismissals, he has made more runs and more hundreds than any other player in the ODI game. It is difficult to think of another player who has missed out on fewer available runs than Kohli has. Kohli, it seems, is fitter, stronger, and more disciplined than every other player. Every quick second, every single run on a throw from the boundary, every run everywhere, is vacuumed off the field.

There are batters of whom it is possible to wonder about what might have been had they not been injured, or had they been fitter, or had they been quicker between the wickets, or had they also played the sweep shot, or the reverse sweep, or the hook. With Kohli, those sorts of limitations and shortcomings were overcome the way a serious, mature, focused 15 year old might solve every problem in Irodov on her way to a one or two digit JEE rank.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that Kohli is arguably the most efficient ODI batter in the history of the format - a player who mastered the nuts and bolts of ODI batting as no other player before him has - it is a mistake to wonder about what Kohli can do in the 50 over match. The essence of being Kohli is what he does, and more importantly, what he doesn’t do.

Kohli is never self indulgent. He prays to the run god as perhaps few ODI bats have done before him. He does so because it is the role he has carved out for himself, especially as he got older and Mahendra Singh Dhoni retired. If you have followed their careers, Tendulkar and Dhoni changed similarly as they got older. Kohli provides what an efficient contemporary ODI side needs: a banker in its middle order. He does it better than any of his contemporaries or his predecessors. He collects every run offered (and a few more because he’s still a magnificent stroke maker when he wants to be).

Kohli is unrelentingly disciplined, unyieldingly competitive and never beaten. Whenever he’s sent in to bat for his team, everybody - his teammates, opponents, you, your friends and rivals - can be guaranteed that Kohli will eke out every run on offer until he gets out. His batting seems less subject to moods than any other player. A large part of this is due to the Irodov-solving levels of preparation. He’s rarely confronted with anything he’s not expecting.

When I watch Kohli, I often wonder “Does he not want to step away and smash this guy over extra cover right now?”. And Kohli never does. So much so that when he does, there’s usually a very good reason. For example, in the recent World Cup match against England, Kohli stepped out to try and force the bowler over mid-off and was out to a miscue. The wicket wasn’t plumb, it was difficult to hit the ball on the rise and get it off the square off a good length. The charge was therefore on, because the more desirable options were unavailable. Unsurprisingly a couple of other IND bats also perished trying similar strokes relatively early in their innings. The result was an IND score of 229. But in those conditions, that was a good score. Kohli’s choice, even if it didn’t come off, was the efficient choice in a situation in which there weren’t the same range of options as usual.

Whether Kohli is the greatest ODI player of all time is matter of debate. I don’t think he is because he tends not to be challenged when it comes to scoring rates. The batter at the other end in the IND sides he has played in has tended to take care of scoring rates in a way that the batter at the other end didn’t do for Viv Richards, Sachin Tendulkar or AB de Villiers (three batters who were comparably consistent). This curse of playing in a very strong team and not facing circumstances batters in lesser teams are often challenged by as a rule, is one Kohli shares with the batter he most resembles among his predecessors in my view - Ricky Ponting. What might Ricky Ponting have achieved if he played for, say, the England of his day? We’ll never know.

There ought to be no debate about one thing. Kohli is the most efficient run scorer in the history of the format. No other player has measured risks as precisely and effortlessly as Kohli does. He’s as likely to be dismissed to a great ball as other great players. He’s as likely to miscue an attacking shot as other great players. But until that happens, he’s peerless at collecting every run there is to collect. That is a testament to his professionalism and to the quality of his batsmanship. It has also been his team’s greatest batting asset for a decade.