Kohli beats Sachin, Lara; becomes fastest to reach 20,000 international runs

PTI, Jun 27, 2019, 6:31 PM IST

Manchester: India captain Virat Kohli Thursday became the fastest batsman to reach 20,000 international runs, eclipsing batting greats Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara.

Kohli broke the long-standing feat held jointly by Tendulkar and Lara during India’s World Cup encounter against West Indies here.

Kohli reached the milestone in only his 417th international innings, while Tendulkar and Lara, both retired now, took 453 innings each to get there.

Prior to Thursday’s match, Kohli was 37 runs short of the milestone and reached the feat with a single off West Indies skipper Jason Holder in the 25th over of the India innings.

Kohli, thus, became the 12th batsman and third Indian after Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid to reach 20,000 international runs.

The 30-year-old India captain has so far accumulated 11,549 runs in Tests, besides 1647 runs in T20 cricket.

His runs tally in ODIs prior to Thursday’s match stood at 11903.

Besides this, Kohli also became only the third captain in the history of the World Cup to register four consecutive 50-plus scores.

The other skippers to attain the feat are Graeme Smith (in 2007) and Aaron Finch (2019).