With Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar celebrating his 50th birthday on Monday, former Australian skipper, Ricky Ponting has weighed in on the never-ending debate involving Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli. While Tendulkar is regarded as the ‘God of Cricket’ by fans, Kohli has rightfully earned the tag of being a ‘modern-era great’ by dominating the batting charts in all the formats of the game.
Interestingly, Virat Kohli believes that no player should be compared with the Little Master. Reflecting on Tendulkar’s incredible career ahead of his 50th birthday, Ricky Ponting opted to settle the best batter debate with his noteworthy statements. The Delhi Capitals (DC) head coach rated Sachin Tendulkar as the best batter he has ever seen in the game. Speaking to Sanjana Ganesan on The ICC Review, Ponting acknowledged that Tendulkar was the best player of his generation.
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Elaborating the same, Ricky Ponting said, “I’ve said forever Sachin’s technically the best batter that I’ve ever seen, and played with or against. Whatever plan that we came up with as a bowling group, he found a way to combat it, whether it was in India or Australia. It’s hard to rank and judge players as everyone is different and everyone plays the game differently. But certainly through the generation that I played, he was technically the best player that I saw.”
The former Australian cricketer observed that Tendulkar’s record of playing 200 Test matches for Team India is nothing but an ‘unbelievable feat’. Ponting also opened up about Kohli’s comparisons and said that the weighing up of the two icons of cricket can be done when Kohli finishes his international career.
Elaborating the same, Ricky Ponting said, “Regardless of how many runs you make, how many hundreds you make, to be physically good enough and have a skillset set good enough to stand up and play 200 Test matches is amazing. Virat’s got all that ahead of him just yet. He’s an unbelievably good player, there’s no doubt about that. He’s got over 70-odd international hundreds now. Sachin made a 100, didn’t he? Let’s wait until Virat’s career’s over and then I think it’ll be a much fairer comparison.”
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Batting legend Tendulkar represented Team India in six World Cups and he also took part in India’s World Cup-winning squad with run-machine Kohli in 2011. The 50-year-old is the only cricketer to have smashed 100 centuries in international cricket. The Master Blaster amassed 18,426 runs in ODIs. Averaging 53.79 in 200 Tests, Tendulkar scored 15,921 runs for the Asian giants. Tendulkar also played 78 matches for Mumbai Indians (MI) in the Indian Premier League (IPL).
