On Friday, India and Australia will lock horns with each other in Ranchi is expected to be a cracker of a game as the hosts will be looking forward to sealing their fourth successive bilateral series win and Aaron Finch’s touring side out to avoid an eighth straight series defeat.
In order to give it much more interesting angle to the game, there are a few statistical milestones beckoning for a few central figures of the Indian team, chief among them the skipper Virat Kohli and former skipper MS Dhoni.
Virat Kohli was the man of the match for his 40th ODI century, nine less than Sachin Tendulkar’s ODI record. Kohli’s 116 off 120 balls, including 10 boundaries, propped up India’s par total of 250 all out in the 49th over. With his knock of 116 runs at the VCA stadium, Virat Kohli surpassed Dhoni to become the highest scoring batsman at the venue with 325 runs. He has scored his runs in five innings at an average of 89.63. Dhoni stands second with 268 runs in five innings.
Dhoni only needs 33 more runs from becoming the sixth Indian cricketer to score 17,000 international runs. In what may be his final international match in his home town of Ranchi, Dhoni will join the list comprising of Sachin Tendulkar (34,357), Rahul Dravid (24,208), Kohli (19, 569), Sourav Ganguly (18,575) and Virender Sehwag (17,253), who all have already crossed the landmark of 17,00 runs across all three formats.
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Dhoni, who has featured for India and Asia XI in international cricket, has 16,967 runs. He averages 45 from 528 matches with 16 centuries and 106 half-centuries in international cricket under his belt.
Kohli needs 76 runs to surpass Rahul Dravid as India’s third-highest run-scorer in ODIs. Virat has scored 10,693 runs from 216 ODI innings at an average of 59.73. Dravid played 340 ODIs for India from 1996 to 2011, from which he scored 10768 runs in 314 innings at an average of 39.15.
If he gets to 76 in Ranchi on Friday, then Kohli will only be sitting behind Tendulkar and Ganguly.
Another milestone is waiting for opening pair of Rohit Sharma and Shikhar Dhawan. The pair needs 21 runs to move past the tally of 4387 runs scored by Sehwag and Tendulkar as openers in ODIs. In 100 innings as openers, Rohit and Dhawan have scored 4367 runs at an average of 44.11 per match, with 14 stands of more thn 100 runs.
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Rohit is also 155 runs short of the 8,000-mark in ODIs, having scored 7845 runs from 197 innings at an average of 47.25.
The allrounder Ravindra Jadeja, who in Nagpur became third India to the double of 2000 runs and 150 wickets in ODIs, will become India’s eighth most successful bowler if he manages two wickets in Ranchi. Jadeja has 172 career wickets in ODIs, one short of Irfan Pathan’s 173.
