11,000 runs for the Modern Era Legend : Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli, aka the run machine, is currently, without a shadow of a doubt, the best batsman in the world as he has been dominating every format of the game for more than five years he is simply remarkable.

He has been in astonishing form ever since he took charge as Indian captain. Be it in the longer-version or limited-overs cricket, the Delhi-born cricketer never misses an opportunity to make it count, hence touching new heights with each passing day.

The 30-year-old has already crossed 11000 runs in ODI cricket while also owns over 6600 Test runs.

He went past Indian legend, Sachin Tendulkar to become the fastest to score 11,000 runs in One-day internationals.

With due respect to every player, he is the only batsman who could break Sachin Tendulkar’s records, the legend Sachin Tendulkar retired by smashing a mammoth 18,426 runs and 49 centuries across a 463 match career, Sachin Tendulkar played his last ODI against Pakistan.

However, what he also left behind was a prodigy, a sheer batting genius molded pretty much in the same clay as he himself was. Batting at the other end that day was the 23-year-old Virat Kohli, who was just one year old when Tendulkar first represented India, ready to carry forward a legacy, and to establish one of his own.

He has so nonchalantly raised the bar of batting and record breaking, that now when he comes out and weaves his magic, breaking and creating records, they hardly come as surprises. A stat that could fathom his recent achievement of entering the 11,000 club in a record 222 innings.

Innings taken by Virat Kohli to each milestone :

1,000 runs : 24 innings

2,000 runs : 53 innings

3,000 runs : 75 innings

4,000 runs : 93 innings

5,000 runs : 114 innings

6,000 runs : 136 innings

7,000 runs : 161 innings

8,000 runs : 175 innings

9,000 runs : 194 innings

10,000 runs : 205 innings

11,000 runs : 222 innings

His vision and intensity of playing are speechless. He gives everything he has on the field and plays every match as his last match. His hunger and drive for the game are out of the world, he brings pure joy to the game of cricket. The way he strikes a ball and puts it between the two fielders is a true class he is truly a modern-day great.

Virat Kohli is one of the greatest batsmen of the modern cricketing era. He has taken run-scoring in cricket to a whole new level, surpassing batting records at a very swift rate. Even the burden of captaincy hasn’t had any effect on his prodigious run scoring, instead, he has created many records as a skipper as well.

There are many qualities that one can associate with Kohli- determination, perseverance, grit, optimism, bravery, aggression, self-belief, confidence, passion and the list can go on and on. But the one quality that makes Kohli Virat and makes him stand apart from all others playing the sport is his consistency. The ability to turn up day in day out undeterred, and to do the same thing harmoniously, with undiminished passion and hunger is what sets King Kohli apart. The fact that he has left us all speechless shows how insanity- beyond a limit- leads to humans becoming inarticulate

India vs Pakistan : The greatest rivalry in world cricket

You can ask any Indian fan who they love watching their team play against, and the answer will inevitably be Pakistan. The same goes for a Pakistani fan.

Since these two teams do not play any bilateral series against each other any more and only meet at ICC Tournaments and Asia Cup, it serves as a great spectacle to every cricket lover.

The word rivalry has an inherent meaning of a contest, of the last ball thrill and the bittersweet fruit of unpredictability. Rivalries are kept alive by sledging, by the banter from media, history and the quality of the contest in the middle. Keep the political tensions aside between India and Pakistan for a while and concentrate purely on the Cricket.

Everything comes to a standstill on the day of an India vs Pakistan match. Any ICC event seems incomplete without an Indo-Pak game which is always guaranteed a full house.

It is difficult to describe in words the intensity of this battle. Tickets are sold out ages before the match. Even though cricket’s most renowned battle is the Ashes, over the years the Indo-Pak rivalry has turned out to be the mother of all battles.

You can ask any player from either team who has ever been a part of this match-up, and they tell you about the sleepless nights they endured on the eve of the match. Such is the pressure to win.

The stage is set for probably the grandest derby in sports as India take on Pakistan at the Old Trafford on Sunday morning. It can’t get any bigger than this in international cricket, with two familiar foes battling it out in the ICC World Cup after four years.

India and Pakistan will meet for the seventh time in a 50-over World Cup on Sunday, the 16th June 2019. In all the six previous occasions, it has been India all the way. Team India’s victories came across continents and across generations. India meeting Pakistan has been a marquee event in every World Cup.

The World Cup 2019 has turned out to be a wet blanket so far with very little action in the middle testing out the patience of all ardent cricket fans. One means of venting out the frustration arising out of washouts and staying positive is to concentrate on writing and reading by flipping through the pages of the history of the World Cup.

Cricket fans all across the remain shall remain glued to their television sets whenever India take on their arch-rivals Pakistan. However, the gloomy weather in England may disrupt the epic clash on Sunday.

Key Players

For India, it will all circle around one man who has wreaked havoc several times against Pakistan in the past – Virat Kohli. If he delivers again, a victory will be more or less assured.

However, it will be important for the openers to lay a solid foundation to enable a Virat Kohli masterclass.. And that won’t be an easy task for Rohit Sharma and KL Rahul against the pace attack of Pakistan, especially early on when the ball swings.

For Pakistan, the responsibility will be on the seniors to step up and ensure that there’s no panic. Mohammad Amir and his new ball opening partner will be vital; they will have to make early inroads. With the bat, the onus will be on Mohammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik to hold up Pakistan’s batting.

As they both take on each other on 16th June, 2019 – India would be oozing confidence as they have an unbeaten record of 6 World Cup wins in as many games against Pakistan. On the contrary, Pakistan would be fretting over the same, desperate to break the dreaded jinx.

The assessment of Virat Kohli’s World Cup captaincy

We have now reached that point in Virat Kohli’s career where his absolute paramountcy as a batsman of the present era has surpassed just general consensus and is beginning to resemble the unanimous mythification reserved for the pantheon of the game’s true greats, such as his predecessor Sachin Tendulkar.

Kohli has had a decent record as captain so far and going purely by the numbers, he is a better captain than both Dhoni and Ganguly, the predecessors that effectively act as his benchmark.

His Test captaincy has already given as good a yield if not better, than that of Dhoni. An overseas Test series victory Down Under is the highlight of a captaincy tenure spanning 46 Tests out of which he has overseen 26 wins, a far better win-draw-loss ratio than his predecessors.

However, his captaincy will never truly be compared with Ganguly’s considering the stark difference in the two eras, and while he will in all probability end up as the statistically better captain than Dhoni, he will never be able to claim the tag of being India’s best captain with Dhoni having marshaled the team to each of the three major honors in One-Day cricket: the two World Cups and the Champions Trophy.

This World Cup therefore, is Kohli’s acid test as a captain. After the failure in the final of the Champions Trophy against bitter rivals Pakistan, Kohli will need no less than the cup returning to India to even begin making the claim to the status of the best Indian skipper.

And his World Cup debut as a captain could not have gotten off to a better start with India securing a clinical win in their very first game against one of the tournament’s big-names : South Africa.

The captaincy moves which he made were phenomenal in today’s match. The team selection was top notch. According to all experts, Bhuvneshwar shouldn’t have made it to the playing XI. However, Kohli kept in mind the good form Bhuvneshwar Kumar had displayed against the Proteas on India’s tour to South Africa over a year ago.

Field placements : Kohli is known to have an attacking and positive mindset in his approach to the game, and it has never been a secret that this rubs off massively on his captaincy.

The bowling changes in the middle overs : After a dream start set up by Bumrah’s magical opening spell, the Proteas regrouped and got to 78/2. However, the introduction of Chahal just as the two batsmen were settling in rocked them back to the back foot.

Following this, Kohli quickly brought in Kuldeep for a second time after a short disappointing first spell, to bowl to the two left-handed batsmen, yielding the scalp of JP Duminy. After this second shower of wickets, Kohli brought on his part-timer Kedhar Jadhav and bowled him in tandem with his two strike pacers in Kumar and Bumrah.

After this second shower of wickets, Kohli brought on his part-timer Kedhar Jadhav and bowled him in tandem with his two strike pacers in Kumar and Bumrah. Every change that he made today, possible all were successful.

All in all, it has been a tidy and mature outing as skipper for Kohli on his World Cup debut meriting not much criticism and a whole lot of cautious praise.

It’s one WIN done, and Kohli knows more than anyone the importance of taking it one day at a time, but an Indian fan cannot but help think of the day when he might lift the coveted World Cup trophy for Indiaft the coveted World Cup trophy for India.