In batting terms, 49 doesn’t hold a great deal of significance. It’s a stop on the road, a stepping stone to the mini-milestone that a half-century is.
In One-Day International cricket, however, 49 has been a significant number for 11 and a half years now. After all, it is the number of centuries Sachin Tendulkar made in the 50-over format, the most by any batsman in the history of the ODI game.
Several batsmen were touted in the wake of Tendulkar’s retirement as potential candidates to get past the little big man’s gargantuan accomplishment, but all of them fell by the wayside, victims to the vicissitudes of form, age and time. All but one, that is.
For a long time now, it has been taken for granted that it’s just a matter of when rather than whether Virat Kohli would draw abreast of Tendulkar. While the Delhi batsman’s exploits in the other two formats have been very impressive, in the ODI format, he has been in a league of his own, be it while batting first or, with greater impact, while chasing a target. At various stages, Kohli has been held as the one batsman most likely to break Tendulkar’s feat of 49 ODI hundreds and 100 international centuries. It’s a cross that’s impossibly heavy to bear, but it’s also a cross that has sat lightly on his broad shoulders.
For almost three years between November 2019 and September 2022, Kohli hit a screeching roadblock. The centuries dried up, even the fifties became sporadic. Epitaphs were being written, doomsday predictions resonating loud and clear. That that period coincided with the darkest phase in Kohli’s cricketing career, culminating in him no longer being India captain in any format, merely added to the hushed whispers that he was living on borrowed time.
Kohli hasn’t lived on anyone else’s timelines; he lives on his own terms, a truism he has driven home emphatically in the last 14 months, starting with a 1,020-day drought-ending international hundred against Afghanistan in the T20 Asia Cup in the UAE in September last year.
As he rediscovered a second wind, the hundreds started to flow again – in Test cricket, and in the 50-over game, where even during his worst phases, he found a way to keep the runs coming. And so it was that, at the start of the World Cup, he had 47 ODI tons, two short of the man who came to symbolise Indian batting in the post-Sunil Gavaskar era.
Kohli made a roaring start to the World Cup with 85 in India’s opener against Australia, followed it up with an unbeaten 55 against Afghanistan and was dismissed for 16 against Pakistan in Ahmedabad. No. 48 seemed imminent even at that stage and it came in Pune, against Bangladesh, admittedly with a little help from KL Rahul, who turned down singles so that Kohli could keep his tryst with three-figures.
Twice in the next two games, against New Zealand in Dharamsala (95) and Sri Lanka in Mumbai (88), he came within touching distance of No. 49, only to fall tantalisingly short. It was against this backdrop that he arrived in Kolkata, for the top-of-the-table clash against South Africa.
It was at the Eden Gardens, nearly 14 years back, that Kohli brought up his first international ton, against Sri Lanka in December 2009. At the time, Kohli was an upstart, a tyro in a line-up of virtuous including Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir and Suresh Raina (Yuvraj Singh and Mahendra Singh Dhoni didn’t play that game). By 5 November 2023, Kohli had risen through the ranks to become the senior statesman, the mentor to batsmen like Shubman Gill and Ishan Kishan, Suryakumar Yadav and Shreyas Iyer.
Kohli is dramatis persona, the principal character of any narrative, whether he likes it or not. Most times, without coveting it, he does like it. But he’d rather have been left to his own devices in this instance because November 5 was the day he was born. On match-day against South Africa, he would turn a wise 35; it was taken as the ultimate proof that the stars were aligning favourably to make the day of his birth special for more reasons than one.
After stacking up an unbeaten 101 – his joint slowest ODI hundred came off 119 deliveries, but it had more to do with the conditions than his single-minded desire to celebrate his birthday with a cherished milestone – Kohli admitted to waking up with ‘excitement’. “I had this sense of ‘it’s going to be something more today’ rather than ‘it’s just one more game in the World Cup,” he said on receiving the Player of the Match award. Given that he had twice not been able to translate big half-centuries into the eagerly awaited 49th, he took that feeling of excitement as the spur to bed down and join Tendulkar in the exclusive Club 49.
Tendulkar took 452 innings to get to No. 49, against Bangladesh in Mirpur in the Asia Cup in 2012. Kohli’s came significantly quicker, in just 277 hits, but how much should be read into that remains open to debate. For the rest. In Kohli’s mind, that debate is a non-starter. “To equal my hero’s record in ODIs is something that’s a huge honour for me,” he went on. “I am never going to be as good as him. There’s a reason why we all looked up to him. He’s perfection when it comes to batting, he’s always going to be my hero regardless of what happens.”
Sunday was further reiteration, if indeed proof was needed, of Kohli’s adaptability and versatility, his ability to act as the glue around which the batting can revolve if that’s what the team needs. Rohit Sharma had provided India with a blistering start on a sluggish surface. As the going got tougher, India revised their approach, using Kohli as the fulcrum around which the innings would revolve. Kohli was scratchy, inelegant, not always convincing, never fully fluent (how often have we used these terms in connection with this man?) but he was forever switched on, the hundred a secondary goal compared to the primary target of batting through the innings. In the end, both objectives were achieved; Kohli 101 not out, India 326 for five. South Africa buried under the avalanche of runs, Kohli statistically on a par with Tendulkar. An Eden night, if ever there was one.
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