Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!
Virat Kohli continued to do what he does best as he notched up his 41st century in the 3rd ODI against Australia in Ranchi.
Virat Kohli notched up his 41st ODI century on Friday. (PTI Photo)
Shared News: Updated: March 9, 2019 3:24:21 pm
Virat Kohli continued to do what he does best as he notched up his 41st one-day international (ODI) century in the 3rd ODI against Australia in Ranchi. Coming into bat after the dismissal of Shikhar Dhawan, Kohli took some time to settle down before going to play a perfect ODI knock. While wickets kept tumbling at one end, the Indian captain kept waging a lone battle. But not once did he seem out of control of his innings and went on to reach the three-figure mark in 85 balls. This was his second successive hundred in the series.
The Indian skipper was finally dismissed on 123 but that was not before he had smashed 16 fours and a six. With this hundred, Kohli is now eight centuries away from surpassing Sachin Tendulkar’s record, who leads the charts with 49 tons. This was Kohli’s 66th hundred across all formats and eighth versus Australia.
He now heads the list of batsmen with most hundreds in India vs Australia ODI’s. Sachin Tendulkar held the previous record with seven of them.
Kohli also became the fourth Indian skipper to pile up 4,000 runs in ODI cricket. Kohli now joins the elite list of former skippers Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Mohammad Azharuddin and Sourav Ganguly.
To add to the list of statistics, Kohli, with 10,770 runs, also overtook Rahul Dravid’s mark of 10,768 in his 217th innings and is now third on India’s all-time ODI run table with only Sachin Tendulkar (18,426 runs) and Sourav Ganguly (11,221 runs) ahead of him.
In contrast to his hundred in Nagpur which was a fighting one, Kohli attacked the bowlers more. His domination also showed that in his entire innings he played and missed only one delivery.
Such has been the dominance of Kohli on home soil that he has converted each of his last 6 ODI fifties to centuries.
Chasing 314, India got off to a poor start as both the openers returned to the pavilion inside five overs. Ambati Rayudu once again failed to deliver as the middle-order batsman was cleaned up by Pat Cummins on 2.
Earlier, Usman Khawaja notched up his maiden ton and helped Australia post 313/5 in their respective 50 overs. He also constructed a 193-run stand with skipper Aaron Finch for the first wicket. The left-handed batsman reached the milestone in 107 balls in the 37th over of Australia’s innings.
Most 100s after 225 ODIs:
41 V KOHLI
27 H Amla (174 ODIs)
25 AB de Villiers
23 S Tendulkar
22 Rohit Sharma
21 S Ganguly
