By NajamSports Team | October 13, 2026
I have been watching Virat Kohli bat for the better part of two decades now, and I will say this upfront: I did not expect to be writing this sentence in 2026. At 37, Virat Kohli is playing some of the best cricket of his life.
Not the nostalgic "he still has something left" kind of cricket. The actual best. AB de Villiers — the one man who has shared a dressing room with Kohli long enough to know the difference — said it out loud this month: the 2026 version of Kohli might be better than the 2016 version. Better than the man who scored 973 IPL runs in a single season. Let that sink in.
Two weeks ago, on September 27, Kohli walked out against the West Indies in Thiruvananthapuram and did something no batter in the history of one-day cricket had ever done in a single innings: he crossed 15,000 ODI runs and raised his 55th ODI century — an unbeaten 139 — in the same knock. India won comfortably, of course. That is what happens when Kohli gets a hundred chasing or setting; the scoreboard just obeys him.
So here is what this article is. Not a news report — you can get those anywhere. This is the full picture: the records, the comeback from the wilderness, the captaincy that remade Indian cricket, the fights with his own board, and the one last mountain he wants to climb — the 2027 World Cup. Because if you want to understand modern cricket, you start with Kohli. Everything else is footnotes.
What Happened?
The last two weeks have been peak Kohli: a historic knock, a bizarre controversy, an old secret spilling out, and a tribute that reminded everyone he is human. Let me take them one by one.
The double milestone. First ODI against the West Indies, Thiruvananthapuram, late September 2026. Kohli finished 139 not out, his 55th ODI hundred, and somewhere along the way he became only the second man after Sachin Tendulkar to reach 15,000 ODI runs — and the fastest ever to get there. It was also his 13th century against the West Indies, which put him level with Sunil Gavaskar for the most hundreds against the Caribbean side. Gavaskar needed 38 matches; Kohli did it in 74, but across eras that comparison hardly matters — what matters is that the name next to Gavaskar's on that list is Kohli's.
The "better than 2016" verdict. A few days ago, AB de Villiers told India Today that he sees a freer, more relaxed Kohli now — a man who has let go of old habits and is simply expressing his talent. "He realises all he can do is go out and express his talents and let the fans enjoy it one last time," de Villiers said. Coming from Mr. 360 himself, that is not small talk. That is a verdict.
The RCB captaincy secret. On October 9, former wicketkeeper Parthiv Patel dropped a bombshell on Aakash Chopra's YouTube channel: before the 2019 IPL season, with Kohli still captain, the franchise offered him the Royal Challengers Bengaluru captaincy. "Be ready," he was told. Then the two men who made the offer — coaches Ashish Nehra and Gary Kirsten — were themselves replaced, and Patel did not play a single game that season. Moeen Ali had said the same thing earlier on Sports Tak. So the franchise that Kohli has served since 2008 once quietly planned to take the armband off him. It never happened — but the revelation tells you how close cricket history came to looking very different.
The Rs 5 crore claim. And then the strange one. On October 7, Dinesh Sharma — known as Falahari Maharaj, president of the Shri Krishna Janmabhoomi Sangharsh Nyas — alleged that Rs 5 crore had been spent to bring Kohli to spiritual leader Premanand Maharaj's ashram in Vrindavan. Kohli's spokesperson responded with the kind of language lawyers write when they mean it: the claim was "completely false, baseless and factually incorrect," and Kohli visits the ashram out of personal faith. No evidence has surfaced to support the allegation. I will come back to why this pattern — Kohli, a storm, Kohli standing his ground — keeps repeating in his career.
The tribute. On October 8, veteran actor Nana Patekar died at 75 after a cardiac arrest. Kohli's post was short and genuine: "A true legend of Indian cinema. His work and legacy will live on for generations. Rest in peace." Sachin Tendulkar posted his own tribute the same day. Small moment, but it showed the softer Kohli that the on-field snarl sometimes hides.
The Numbers: A Career in Records
I am not a man who falls in love with spreadsheets. Cricket is played on grass, not on paper. But with Kohli, the numbers are not decoration — they are the argument. So let me lay them out, all verified, because when you see them together, the scale of this career hits you like a bouncer.
One-day internationals — the format he owns: 317 matches, 15,109 runs at an average of 58.78 and a strike rate of 94.36, with 55 centuries and 79 fifties. Highest score: 183. Read that average again. 58.78 — across 317 games and eighteen years. No one in the history of 50-over cricket with a career this long has combined volume and consistency like this. Tendulkar finished on 18,426 runs; Kohli is second, and closing, with the most hundreds anyone has ever scored in the format — Tendulkar's 49 is now six behind in the rear-view mirror.
Then there are the records inside the records. Fastest man ever to 15,000 ODI runs — he took Tendulkar's mark and shattered it. Most ODI runs on Indian soil: 7,006, past Tendulkar's 6,976. Thirteen hundreds against the West Indies, level with Gavaskar. And he is tied with Tendulkar on 59 List A centuries — one more and that record falls too.
But here is the part that stuns me. The 2023–2026 phase. In his mid-thirties — the age when batters are supposed to slow down, trim their ambition, and talk about "playing situational cricket" — Kohli has gone faster. 52 ODIs since 2023: 2,638 runs at 65.95 with a strike rate of 101.34, 11 hundreds and 15 fifties. His career average is 58.78; his last three years average 65.95. His career strike rate is 94; lately it is 101. He is not declining. He is accelerating. Statisticians have even started drawing the Tendulkar parallel: like Sachin before the 2011 World Cup, Kohli is producing a late-career surge built on intent — 154 of his 181 career ODI sixes have come in this recent window. The anchor learned to hit sixes. Think about that.
The other formats tell the rest: 9,230 Test runs with 30 centuries (he has stepped away from Tests now), 4,188 T20I runs with one hundred (retired from the format after winning the 2024 T20 World Cup). All told: 86 international centuries and 28,498 international runs. Only Tendulkar's 100 hundreds stand above the 86 — and Tendulkar played 24 years to get there.
World Cups deserve their own paragraph, because this is where legends are weighed. Four ODI World Cups so far. Winner in 2011 as a young gun. Semi-finals in 2015 and 2019. And then 2023 — the tournament that settled every argument. 765 runs in 11 innings at 95.62, Player of the Tournament, breaking Tendulkar's record for the most runs in a single World Cup. India lost the final to Australia — the one stain on that campaign — but nobody who watched it will ever forget who carried that team. He has now confirmed that the 2027 World Cup in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia will be his fifth — and his last.
And the IPL — because you cannot tell Kohli's story without Bengaluru. With RCB since 2008. Captain from 2013 to 2021. The first title finally came in 2025 under Rajat Patidar's captaincy, and then — this is my favourite detail — they defended it in 2026, beating Gujarat Titans by 5 wickets in the final. Eighteen years of waiting, then two trophies in two years. Along the way this season, after two consecutive ducks left him admittedly nervous, Kohli smashed an unbeaten 105 off 60 against Kolkata Knight Riders in Raipur — his ninth IPL hundred, his first since 2024 — and became the player with the most IPL appearances ever, 279. He celebrated that hundred quietly, almost apologetically. The old Kohli would have roared. The new one just raised his bat. I think that tells you everything about where his head is now.
The Wilderness and the Comeback
Here is the part people forget when they recite the records. There was a time — not long ago — when serious people were asking whether Virat Kohli was finished.
From November 2019 to September 2022, nearly three years, Kohli did not score a single international hundred. For a man whose entire identity was built on hundreds — on chasing down 350 like it was a net session — this was not a slump. It was an existential crisis, played out in front of a billion people. Every innings was dissected. Every early dismissal became a panel discussion. The same fans who had chanted his name started doing the maths on his replacement.
I remember that period well, because it revealed something about cricket fandom that I have never liked: how fast we bury our greats. Kohli was 33, not 43. He was still scoring runs — just not hundreds. And yet the verdict machine was already warming up.
Then came the Asia Cup in September 2022. A T20 hundred against Afghanistan — his first in the format, and the one that broke the drought. What followed is now history: the 2023 World Cup campaign for the ages, the 50th ODI hundred that took down Tendulkar's record in front of a delirious Wankhede crowd, the 2024 T20 World Cup triumph, and now this 2026 purple patch that has de Villiers comparing him favourably to his own peak.
My honest take? The drought was the best thing that ever happened to Kohli's legacy. Before it, he was a run-machine — feared, admired, but a machine all the same. After it, he is something rarer: a great who was broken open in public and rebuilt himself in public. You cannot buy that kind of story. The records were always going to fall; the comeback is what made him immortal.
The Captain Who Remade India
Now let me say something that might annoy the statisticians: Kohli's greatest achievement is not a batting record. It is what he did to Indian cricket as its leader.
Sixty-eight Tests as captain. Forty wins — the most by any Indian captain, by a distance. And the crown jewel: India's first-ever Test series win in Australia, in 2018–19. For seventy years, Indian teams had gone to Australia and come home with lessons. Kohli's team went and came home with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. If you are under thirty, you might not grasp how impossible that felt before it happened.
But the wins are only half the story. Kohli changed the culture. He made fitness non-negotiable — the yo-yo test, the transformed physiques, the fast bowlers who could run in all day. He backed a five-bowler attack when Indian captains had spent decades hiding behind an extra batter. He demanded that India win away from home, not just in dustbowls. The aggression — the celebrations, the stares, the refusal to back down — was not theatre. It was a message to his own dressing room: we do not come here to compete; we come here to conquer.
Was he flawed? Of course. Team selections could be stubborn. The 2021 World Test Championship final and the 2019 World Cup semi-final still hurt, and his critics will tell you — fairly — that for all the revolution, he never won an ICC trophy as captain. That is the one line on his leadership CV that he could never rewrite. But here is my counter: Dhoni gave India trophies; Kohli gave India a team that believed it could win anywhere. You need both to build an era. History will be kind to him on this — kinder than his contemporaries were.
The Chaser: Cricket's Greatest Finisher
If I had to reduce Virat Kohli to a single image, it would not be a cover drive. It would be this: India needing 80 off the last 10 overs, Kohli on 70 not out, and the opposition captain shuffling his fielders with the body language of a man rearranging deck chairs. Because everyone in the stadium — including, I suspect, the fielding side — already knows how this ends.
No batter in the history of one-day cricket has owned the run-chase like Kohli. The majority of his 55 hundreds have come in chases, and his average batting second — consistently in the mid-60s across his career, well above his already absurd career mark — is a statistic that should not be possible. Chasing is supposed to be the hard part. Scoreboard pressure, required run rates climbing, the crowd going quiet. For Kohli, the chase was always where he was most comfortable — because a target gave his intensity a shape. Give him a number and he would dissect it: which bowlers to target, which overs to absorb, exactly when to shift gears. It was never just hitting; it was arithmetic performed at sprint speed.
Think of the catalogue. The 133 not out off 86 balls against Sri Lanka in Hobart in 2012, chasing 321 in under 37 overs to keep India alive in the CB series — the innings that announced him. The 183 against Pakistan in the 2012 Asia Cup, still his highest ODI score, in a 330 chase. The unbeaten hundreds in Australia in 2016 that made even the home crowd applaud. Time and again, when the equation looked impossible, Kohli treated "impossible" as a scheduling issue.
Here is what I believe separates him from every other great chaser: he never panicked, and he never let his partner panic. Watch old footage and you will see it — between overs, the quick word, the nod, the calm that spread outward from him like a rumour. Dhoni was the finisher who absorbed pressure; Kohli was the chaser who redistributed it back onto the bowler. By the 40th over, it was never India under pressure. It was the bowling side, wondering where the next boundary was coming from.
And that is why the 2026 version of Kohli feels so poignant to me. The snarl is gone, replaced by that quiet raised bat. But the chase brain — the cold, beautiful arithmetic — is still entirely intact. De Villiers is right: this relaxed Kohli, free of the need to prove anything, might be the most dangerous one of all. Because now he is not chasing targets. He is chasing history — and he has always been best at that.
The Body That Refused to Age
There is one more revolution with Kohli's name on it that deserves its own section, because it changed every dressing room in Asia: fitness.
When Kohli took over as Test captain, the Indian team's relationship with fitness was — let me be polite — casual. Kohli made it doctrinal. The yo-yo endurance test became a selection benchmark. Training sessions became non-negotiable. He led it himself, visibly: the transformed physique, the discipline around diet, the sprint between wickets that turned singles into twos and twos into threes. Fast bowlers who once broke down by their late twenties started lasting into their thirties. Fielding standards — India's historic weakness — rose to genuinely elite levels.
Critics called it obsession. Maybe it was. But look at the receipt: at 37, Kohli is still among the fittest athletes in world cricket, still running twos like a 25-year-old, still fielding in the deep without being hidden. The 2023–2026 numbers — 65.95 average, 101 strike rate — are not an accident of form. They are the compound interest on a decade of physical discipline. Every young Indian cricketer today, from Shubman Gill downward, trains the way Kohli trained. That is a legacy no scorecard captures — but ask any coach in India, and they will tell you it is real.
The Storms That Never Quite Broke Him
No honest Kohli profile can skip the controversies — and I am not going to insult your intelligence by pretending they did not happen. But I am also not going to dress them up. Here are the facts, as they happened.
The BCCI sacking (December 2021). This was the ugliest public fight between an Indian captain and his board in modern memory. Kohli stepped down as T20I captain after the 2021 World Cup. On December 8, the BCCI announced — in the last line of a press release about the Test squad for South Africa — that Rohit Sharma would take over the ODI captaincy. Just like that. No farewell, no conversation — at least not one Kohli acknowledged. The next day, board president Sourav Ganguly claimed he had personally asked Kohli not to quit the T20I job. Then, on December 15, Kohli held a press conference and contradicted him openly: he had been told about the ODI decision just 90 minutes before the selection meeting, with no prior communication — and nobody had asked him to stay on as T20I captain. One of them was not telling the truth, and Indian cricket has never fully recovered its innocence about how the board treats its greatest players. A month later, Kohli resigned the Test captaincy too. An era ended not with a celebration, but with a press conference.
The Kumble rift (2017). Anil Kumble, a legend, resigned as India's head coach in June 2017, calling his relationship with the captain "untenable." Kohli never spoke about it in detail, and Kumble kept his dignity — but the message was clear: cross Kohli, and even legends do not survive in his orbit. It was the first real evidence that his intensity had a sharp edge, and that the edge cut both ways.
The RCB 2019 plan. As Parthiv Patel revealed this month, even his own franchise once considered moving on from him as captain. It did not happen — but combined with the BCCI episode, it paints a picture: institutions kept trying to manage Kohli out, and Kohli kept making himself unmanageable-outable by the simplest method available — scoring runs.
The ashram claim (October 2026). The latest storm, and the thinnest. A religious figure alleged a Rs 5 crore payment behind Kohli's well-known visits to Premanand Maharaj's ashram; Kohli's camp called it baseless; no evidence has emerged. I include it not because it has substance, but because it shows the tax of being Kohli: when you are this famous, your private faith becomes someone else's press conference.
Here is my reading of all of it. Kohli's career is a loop: defiance, backlash, redemption. He defies — the board, the coach, the critics, age itself — the establishment pushes back, and then he answers the only way he knows: with the bat. It is exhausting to watch sometimes. It is also why he matters beyond cricket. In a sport run by committees, he is the rare superstar who never learned to be convenient.
Why This News Matters
So why am I writing 5,000 words about a man whose Wikipedia page you have already read? Because we are standing at a very specific moment in this story, and I do not want you to miss it.
The 2027 World Cup is eighteen months away, and Kohli has confirmed it will be his last. South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia. He will be 39. He already has a 2011 winner's medal, but that was as a kid in someone else's team. 2023 was his tournament — 765 runs, Player of the Tournament — and it ended with Australia lifting the trophy in Ahmedabad while he stood in the outfield watching. I have never seen a more devastating image in cricket. 2027 is his chance to replace it — to walk away not just as the greatest ODI batter ever, but as a two-time world champion who closed his own story on his own terms.
There is also a bigger cricket point. The ODI format itself is fighting for relevance — squeezed between T20 leagues and the Test championship. Kohli is the format's greatest living argument. Every time a 37-year-old scores 139 not out and breaks two records before lunch, the 50-over game gets a little harder to dismiss. When he goes, ODIs lose their marquee name. Enjoy these eighteen months. They are the last of something.
And for India, the transition is already underway. Shubman Gill's generation is taking over the batting order, and Kohli — to his enormous credit — is not clinging to the stage. De Villiers put it perfectly: he is playing free, letting people enjoy him "one last time." There is grace in that which the younger Kohli — all snarl and stare — never had. I like this version more. I think most of India does too.
Our Analysis
Let me put my cards on the table, because a profile without an opinion is just a press release.
First: Virat Kohli is the greatest ODI batter of all time, and it is no longer a debate — it is arithmetic. Tendulkar has the volume record; Kohli has everything else — the average, the hundreds, the chase record, the single-tournament peak. Viv Richards was the most destructive; Tendulkar the most complete across eras; Kohli is the most reliable match-winner the format has seen. When India needed 300 chased, there was exactly one man on the planet you wanted walking out at number three. That is not nostalgia. That is data.
Second: the late-career surge changes how we should talk about ageing in cricket. We have a lazy habit in this sport: 32 is old, 35 is ancient, 37 is a farewell tour. Kohli averaging 65.95 at a strike rate of 101 since 2023 — better than his career marks — should embarrass every selector who has ever used a birth certificate as a selection criterion. Fitness, hunger and adaptability beat the calendar. Tendulkar proved it before 2011; Kohli is proving it again before 2027. The pattern is not a coincidence.
Third — and this is where I get uncomfortable, because I admire the man — the controversies were not all forced on him. The Kumble episode, the Ganguly press-conference war, the years of frost with the board: Kohli's refusal to bend is heroic until it is self-destructive, and sometimes it was both at once. Greatness gave him leverage; he used it like a hammer. I do not say this to diminish him. I say it because the full Kohli — brilliant and difficult — is more interesting than the saint his PR team sometimes sells you.
Finally: watch the next eighteen months closely. If India win the 2027 World Cup with Kohli scoring heavily, the GOAT debate ends permanently — not just in ODIs, but in the broader "greatest cricketer of the modern era" conversation. If they fall short, he still walks away with 55 hundreds, 15,000 runs and a legacy no defeat can touch. Either way, we are watching the final chapter of the defining batting career of the 21st century. Do not scroll past it.
Conclusion
Virat Kohli at 37: 55 ODI centuries, 15,109 runs, the fastest to 15,000, a late-career surge that has his oldest friend in cricket calling him better than his peak — and one last World Cup on the horizon. He fought his board, outlasted his doubters, survived a three-year drought that would have ended lesser careers, and remade Indian cricket in his image along the way. The controversies will be footnotes; the cover drives will be the text.
Eighteen months to 2027. I will be watching every ball — and so should you.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many ODI centuries does Virat Kohli have?
55 — the most by any batter in ODI history. His 55th came on September 27, 2026, an unbeaten 139 against the West Indies in Thiruvananthapuram, in the same innings in which he crossed 15,000 ODI runs.
Is Virat Kohli retired?
Not from ODIs. He retired from T20 internationals after winning the 2024 T20 World Cup and has stepped away from Test cricket. He continues to play ODIs for India and the IPL for Royal Challengers Bengaluru, and has confirmed the 2027 ODI World Cup will be his last.
What is Virat Kohli's ODI batting average?
58.78 across 317 matches, with 15,109 runs — the highest career average among batters with comparable longevity in the format's history.
Did Virat Kohli really average over 65 since 2023?
Yes. In 52 ODIs from 2023 to 2026, he has scored 2,638 runs at 65.95 with a strike rate of 101.34, including 11 centuries — better than his career numbers on every count.
Why was Virat Kohli removed as India's ODI captain?
In December 2021, after Kohli stepped down as T20I captain, the BCCI named Rohit Sharma as ODI captain, with the selectors preferring a single white-ball captain. Kohli later said he was informed only 90 minutes before the selection meeting, contradicting the board president's version of events.
Will Virat Kohli play the 2027 World Cup?
All signs say yes — and that it will be his farewell. He has confirmed the tournament in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia will be his fifth and final ODI World Cup.
Sources
- NDTV Sports — Kohli's 55th ODI ton and 15,000 runs vs West Indies
- NDTV Sports — AB de Villiers on Kohli being better than his 2016 self
- NDTV Sports — Parthiv Patel on RCB's 2019 captaincy plan
- Republic World — Kohli denies Rs 5 crore ashram claim
- NDTV Sports — Kohli's tribute to Nana Patekar
- TheSportsTak — Kohli and Rohit's late-career numbers vs Tendulkar
- Outlook India — 55th century and 15,000 runs in Thiruvananthapuram
- The Bridge — Kohli-BCCI captaincy saga timeline (Dec 2021)
- Sportskeeda — Kohli's 54th ODI ton vs New Zealand, Indore (Jan 2026)
- NDTV Sports — Kohli's 9th IPL hundred vs KKR, IPL 2026
Read More on NajamSports.online
- My Imran Khan deep dive — yesterday's 5pm profile of the all-rounder who changed Pakistan cricket.
- India's upcoming ODI series against New Zealand — the squad news that frames Kohli's next assignment.
- The IPL — where Kohli finally lifted the trophy with RCB after 18 years.