Visakhapatnam: Virat Kohli on Wednesday became the fastest to score 10,000 runs in ODIs, rewriting, fittingly enough, the iconic Sachin Tendulkar’s record and compounding the cricket community’s conundrum to find the right superlatives for his phenomenal batting.
‘King’ Kohli comfortably bettered the record set by the man who was to Indian cricket for over two decades what the 29-year-old has been for the past few years. Tendulkar took 259 innings to get there, while Kohli has so far batted in 205 innings.
Seventeen summers ago, Tendulkar had ventured into what was then an unchartered territory, during a match against Australia. On Wednesday, Kohli became the 13th batsman to reach the milestone with an unbeaten 157 off 129 balls, which was his 37th ODI hundred. In the process, he also became the fastest to 1,000 runs in a calendar year, taking just 11 innings to get there.
Not long ago, while the cricket world struggled to look for words to aptly describe Kohli’s phenomenal batting, his coach Ravi Shastri thought it would be wise to visit the bookstore, buy the latest edition of the Oxford dictionary and look for the adjectives that befit the captain and his superhuman feats. “If I were you, I would visit the bookstore and pick up the Oxford dictionary,” Shastri had said after a Kohli century guided India to victory over South Africa in February.
Some years ago, Tendulkar, after scoring his 100th international century, said he would love to see an Indian — someone like Kohli or Rohit Sharma — break his records. At a venue set amidst picturesque hills, Kohli reached the mark when he played Ashley Nurse for a single in the 37th over of the second ODI against the West Indies. Kohli already had an enviable record at the Dr YSR ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium with scores of 118, 117, 99 and 65.
