Virat Kohli walks out, he makes centuries, he breaks records. Such has been his insatiable thirst to ammas runs that it has become almost imperative that he will break records whenever he saunters out to the middle.
In the second ODI against West Indies in Visakhapatnam, Kohli won the toss and elected to bat first. India lost their two openers rather quickly, but in walked Kohli and almost as if everything was bound to fall into place, he took charge of proceedings. It was a template, a perfect recipe of ODI batting. Yes, he was dropped by Jason Holder, but barring that blip, it was a flawless innings.
He galloped past 81 runs, and flew past 10,000 ODI runs for India and in the process, became the fastest batsman in the history of the game to achieve this feat. He bettered the record set by Sachin Tendulkar by 54 innings.
Tossed plenty of records by the wayside
Not only this, but Kohli also took the least time to reach 10,000 ODI runs. He breached the milestone in 10 years and 67 days. He was not done yet and he kept piling on the runs and notched up his 37th ODI century. Over his career this was the seventh time, he scored a century in successive innings which is yet another unique record.
He also the became the only batsman to score five ODI centuries this year. Such has been his control over his batting, that he hit a century of fours this year. Seldom does he look to hit the ball in the air when he starts his innings, and the aforementioned stat is only a vindication of his mental strength and ability.
During the innings, he also went past 1000 ODI runs this year and then breezed past Jonny Bairstow. However, his average reads a mind-boggling 144.71 which is the best by any batsman with minimum 1000 runs in a year in ODIs.
After reaching his century, the Indian captain opened his shoulders and clobbered sixes and boundaries for fun and raced past 150, which his fourth score of more than 150. It was his first such score against the West Indies. He equalled the record of former England captain Andrew Strauss with two scores of more than 150 as a captain.
Kohli remained unbeaten on 157 and this was his highest ODI score in India.
