Kohli creating new records

There is no stopping India captain Virat Kohli. The Indian batsman seems to have taken the phrase ‘Records are meant to be broken’ quite literally. Virat Kohli continued his excellent recent form by smashing a sparkling unbeaten century to lead his side to a comprehensive 124-run victory over South Africa in the third One-day International. Kohli made 160 not out from 159 balls as India, who had been put in to bat, posted 303/6 in their 50 overs before restricting their hosts to 179 all out to take a 3-0 lead in the series. South Africa’s brittle batting line-up, without injured stalwarts Faf du Plessis, AB de Villiers and Quinton de Kock, was stifled once more by the Indian spinners as Kuldeep Yadav, who took career-best figures (4/23 in 9 overs), and Yuzvendra Chahal (4/46 in 9 overs) strangled their innings.

On Wednesday, in Cape Town Kohli scored his 34th century in his 205th match. He is only behind Indian batting legend Sachin Tendulkar in the list of most hundreds. Tendulkar has 49 hundreds in 463 matches. He also holds the record for the most number of ODI centuries (12) among Indian captains, going past Sourav Ganguly’s 11. Only Ricky Ponting is ahead of Kohli with 22 centuries. He also scored the highest score by an Indian in South Africa in ODIs. The previous highest was 152 by Tendulkar against Namibia at Pietermaritzburg in the 2003 World Cup. The Indian skipper also became the first Indian to score more than 100 runs by running. He became the fifth batsman in ODI history to achieve that feat.

In an another record, out of the 160 that Kohli scored, 100 of them were from 1s (75), 2s (22) and 3s (3) and the remaining (60) came from boundaries. The previous best for India is by former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly who got 98 of his runs (130 vs Sri Lanka in 1999) in singles, twos and threes. Kohli also hit his 100th six in ODI cricket. He is the third Indian in the list, behind Dhoni (216) and Rohit Sharma (165). The list is spearheaded by former Pakistani swashbuckler Shahid Afridi who has 351 sixes against his name.