Virat Kohli completes 2000 International runs in 2017

Virat Kohli has made most of his form showing great consistency across all the formats in the past couple of years. The Indian captain is a touch ahead of the other players in ODI cricket as he scored nearly 1400 runs in 2017 with his team-mate Rohit Sharma being the only other to score 1000 ODI runs this year. During the series-deciding 3rd ODI against New Zealand at Kanpur, Kohli became the first to aggregate 2000 International runs this year.

He walked out to bat with 1991 International runs behind him in 2017 and didn’t take long to reach the milestone. He got away with a couple of boundaries and with a single down to third man, the Indian captain reached 2000 runs in International cricket in 2017. This is the 4th time he has amassed 2000 runs in a calendar year after 2012, 2014 and 2016. The last year was Kohli’s best of the three as he scored a total of 2595 runs in just 41 innings at an astonishing average of 86.50. In 2017, Kohli has already played 44 innings across the three formats.

By scoring 2000 International runs in consecutive calendar years, he became only the 2nd Indian after Sachin Tendulkar to score 2000 International runs in successive years. Sachin scored over 2000 International runs in three consecutive years; 1996, 1997 and 1998. Matthew Hayden (2002, 2003 and 2004) is the only other player to score 2000 International runs in three consecutive years. Six players including Kohli have achieved the feat of scoring 2000 runs across formats in consecutive years.

With 2000 runs the Indian skipper became only the 6th player to aggregate 2000 runs in four different calendar years in International cricket. Kumar Sangakkara and Sachin have done this on six and five different years respectively while Mahela Jayawardene, Hayden and Jacques Kallis had done that earlier in three different years.

Players with 2000 International runs in consecutive calendar years:

(Stats as on October 29, 2017)