The slightest tickle of the bat’s outer edge (so faint that it wasn’t even captured in the infrared imaging system) ended not only Virat Kohli’s burgeoning innings on Wednesday, but a burgeoning running streak as well. When he returned to the Canberra pavilion, gloomy at being fired for 63 races, Kohli was indeed walking away from his first calendar year without scoring an ODI century since his debut season.
So it took a combination of a cricket season shortened by the pandemic and the sustained excellence of Australian Josh Hazlewood to narrowly prevent Kohli from doing what he does best and not extend his streak to a twelfth year. Twice this year, Kohli achieved a score of 89, in Bengaluru in January and in Sydney last week, and both times, it was Hazlewood who prevented him from going further. Hazlewood has now fired Kohli in every game in this series and in four consecutive games between India and Australia in total.
Kohli and India played just nine ODIs in 2020, six of them against Australia and three in and against New Zealand. It still hit five half centuries in that period and averaged 47.9 this year, extraordinary numbers even by the highest standard. But because the triple-digit score remained elusive, 2020 and 2008 now encompass a most incredible spell from consecutive years in which Kohli often seemed to be earning hundreds of ODIs for fun.
It was amazing while it lasted. Since his first century ODI, beaten in India’s final game of 2009 at Eden Gardens, led him into the new decade, Kohli just didn’t look back. 2010 saw three hundred, 2011 saw four, and 2012 – a watershed year in his career as he scored arguably his highest 100 ODI in Hobart and followed up with his highest 100 ODI 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 more ODI than this year. He still scored three hundred in 10 games. But even that’s not nearly as crazy as 2018, where Kohli collected six hundred ODIs from just 14 ODIs, his second year in a row of collecting half a dozen tons. It was not far from three years in a row; 2019 saw him score five hundred in one day.
As phenomenal as that race was, Kohli’s 11 years in a row are not the world record or, for that matter, even the Indian. They are both the same man: Sachin Tendulkar. There was not a single year between 1994 (when it hit its first short-form ton) and 2012 (when it retired) that has not witnessed a hundred Tendulkar ODI. That’s 19 years on the rebound.
To put Kohli’s streak (2009-2019) into perspective, it is important to understand that large numbers of hundreds do not guarantee annual consistency with triple-digit scores. Ricky Ponting, with 30 ODI hundreds, has a best seven-year streak (2005-2011) while Brian Lara, once the all-time 17-year ODI hundreds leader, could only muster a five-year series ( 1995-1999).
Among active cricketers, there are only three batsmen who could realistically match Kohli. Rohit Sharma, who scored one hundred against Australia in the Bengaluru game this year, now has eight consecutive years with ODI centuries (2013-2020), the same and in exactly the same years for Australia captain Aaron Finch, who scored two hundred times. against India in 2020. And if Faf du Plessis hits a hundred in the next ODI series against England, he will extend his streak to seven consecutive years.
But among the retirees, there is a hitter with as many consecutive years as Kohli and another with one more than Kohli. Neither is a hallmark of coherence in the conventional sense. Herschelle Gibbs, by the way, Kohli’s favorite player during his Under-19 days, scored his 21 ODI centuries over an 11-year span between 1999 and 2009. Each of those years was peppered with at least one ton, six of them with precisely one, including in 2006, when their 175 caused the highest and most sensational chase in one-day cricket.
Sitting just above Kohli / Gibbs and only behind Tendulkar is Nathan Astle of New Zealand, who extended his relatively modest 16-century set of ODIs over 12 consecutive years of reaching hundreds of ODIs. Active for all thirteen years, Astle reached a hundred in all of them except the last one in 2007, with only one hundred in nine of those years.
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