It’s been two years since Team India played its first pink-ball Test and they had registered a runaway victory against Bangladesh in 2019 and the chief protagonists of the win were fast bowler Ishant Sharma and captain Virat Kohli. While Ishant won the player of the match award for scalping as many as nine wickets he took in the match, Kohli became just the third player to score 70 international centuries on Day 2 of the match on November 23.
Incidentally, it was also the last time Virat Kohli surpassed the three-figure mark in international cricket. He had amassed 136 off 194 balls at the Eden Gardens before being dismissed by Ebadat Hossain off a stunning catch by Taijul Islam. Kohli had smashed 18 fours in the innings, putting up partnerships of 94 runs and 99 runs with Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane respectively.
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Only Ricky Ponting (71) and Sachin Tendulkar (100) have amassed more centuries in international cricket than Virat Kohli. Among active international cricketers, Australia’s David Warner (43 tons) is closest to Kohli in the list of most international centuries but well behind the Indian captain. Kohli’s longtime teammate Rohit Sharma is the highest Indian century-maker among active cricketers after the former, having scored 41 international tons.
Virat Kohli switched gears in the innings after crossing the three-digit mark, as he had smashed four consecutive boundaries in the 71st over against Abu Jayed. The 33-year-old has since come closest to scoring a century in a T20I, a format in which he has never scored a ton when he made an unbeaten 94 against the West Indies the very next month in Hyderabad.
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In ODIs, he scored 89 twice against Australia – in Bengaluru in January 2020 and in Sydney in November 2020 while in Tests, he scored 74 against Australia in India’s first innings of the Adelaide which was again a pink-ball Test in December 2020.
