It is a strange comparison between Test and T-20 cricket. But, a comparison in numbers found between world’s greatest batsman, Sir Don Bradman, played in 1930 and what present-day cricket’s most prolific batsman, Virat Kohli, did 86 years later in a T20 tournament.
It’s five Tests vs 16 T20 games, 7 Test innings vs 16 T20 knocks. That’s not a perfect recipe to form the basis of a comparison, but the final numbers are interesting.
In the 1930 Ashes played in England, Bradman scored 974 runs in just 7 innings of a five-Test series at an average of 139.14. More than eight decades later in 2016, Kohli reached a dizzy figure in a single tournament of the Indian Premier League, but his final tally of runs fell just one short of Bradman’s. The Royal Challengers Bangalore skipper scored 973 runs, averaging 81.08.
But the stat that best highlights how the game has drastically changed to the demands of a different era is this: Bradman hit 6 sixes in his entire career while Kohli smashed a staggering 38 big hits in one tournament (IPL 9).
In terms of ODIs, too, the record for most runs in a single tournament stands in the name of an Australian, Greg Chappell. He scored 686 runs in 14 matches of the Benson & Hedges World Series Cup in 1980/81 at an average of 68.60.
Greg Chappell is closely followed by Sachin Tendulkar, who scored 673 runs in 11 matches at an average of 61.18 during the 2002/03 World Cup in South Africa.