It took a pandemic to halt century-machine Kohli
NEW DELHI: The faintest tickle of the outside edge of the bat (so faint that it wasn’t even captured on the infrared imaging system) ended not just Virat Kohli’s blossoming innings on Wednesday but also a blossoming careerstreak. As he returned to the Canberra pavilion, grim-faced at being dismissed for 63 runs, Kohli was in fact walking away from his first calendar year without scoring an ODI century since his debut season.
It, then, took a combination of a pandemic-shortened cricket season and sustained excellence from Australia’s Josh Hazlewood to narrowly stop Kohli from doing what he does best and not extend his streak to a twelfth year. Twice this year Kohli got to a score of 89, in Bengaluru in January and Sydney last week, and on both occasions it was Hazlewood who stalled him from getting any further. Hazlewood has now dismissed Kohli in every match this series and across four consecutive India-Australia matches over all.
Kohli and India played just nine ODIs in 2020—six of them against Australia and three in and against New Zealand. He still smacked five half-centuries in that period and averaged 47.9 this year, extraordinary numbers by even the loftiest standard. But because the three-digit score remained elusive, 2020 and 2008 now bracket a most incredible spell of consecutive years in which Kohli often seemed to be notching ODI hundreds for fun.
It was incredible while it lasted. Ever since his first ODI century—struck in India’s final match of 2009 at the Eden Gardens—eased him into the new decade, Kohli simply did not look back. 2010 saw three hundreds, 2011 saw four and 2012—a watershed year in his career when he scored possibly his greatest ODI hundred in Hobart and followed that up with his biggest ODI hundred in Dhaka, all in the space of twenty days – witnessed five.
In 2016, with the team’s focus on the T20 World Cup at home,
Kohli played just one ODI more than he did this year. He still struck three hundreds in 10 matches.
But even that isn’t as crazy as 2018, where Kohli collected six ODI hundreds from just 14 ODIs—his second successive year of collecting a half-dozen tons. It wasn’t far from three years in a row; 2019 saw him score five one-day hundreds.
As phenomenal as that run was, Kohli’s 11 straight years isn’t the world record or for that matter, even the Indian one. Both of those are the same man—Sachin Tendulkar. There wasn’t a single year between 1994 (when he struck his maiden short-format ton) and 2012 (when he retired) that did not witness a Tendulkar ODI hundred. That’s 19 years on the bounce.