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‘Virat Kohli has played 5 more innings than Steve Smith and…’: Ex-opener sums up IND great’s decline

‘Virat Kohli has played 5 more innings than Steve Smith and…’: Ex-opener sums up IND great’s decline


Jan 30, 2025 03:31 PM is

While Virat Kohli has struggled in the last five years, his Fab 4 contemporaries Steve Smith, Joe Root and Kane Williamson have kept going

Steve Smith scored his 36th Test century as he and Usman Khawaja powered a dominant performance from Australia in the first of the two-match series in Sri Lanka. It was an innings in which Smith became the fourth Australian to score over 10,000 runs in the format. He was dismissed on 141 off 251 and his career tally at the end of the innings stood at 10,140 runs at an average of 56.33 in 115 Tests.

Steve Smith now has five career Test centuries than Virat Kohli

Former India opener Aakash Chopra has pointed out that Smith now has five more centuries than Virat Kohli despite the latter having played five more innings in his career. “Smith has scored a century (against Sri Lanka). He has struck his 35th century in just 205 innings. (Joe) Root has scored 36 hundreds but he has played 278 innings. So if you look at it in terms of the strike rate, the number of innings he takes to score a century, then Steve Smith is ahead of Joe Root,” said Chopra on his Youtube channel.

Kohli’s decline in Test cricket the last five years has led to him falling behind the rest of his fab 4 contemporaries – Smith, England’s Joe Root and New Zealand’s Kane Williamson. Chopra stated that Williamson’s frequency of scoring centuries is better than Root’s and Smith’s. “Kane Williamson has played only 186 innings and has scored 33 hundreds. His strike rate is better than those two,” he said.

“If I see Virat Kohli here, he has played 210 innings, which means he has played five more innings than Steve Smith and has five centuries fewer than him. So Virat Kohli, unfortunately, now has the worst strike rate because he has scored only three centuries in the last five years,” Chopra added.

Virat Kohli returns to Ranji Trophy

Kohli is currently playing for Delhi in their final Ranji Trophy group stage match against Railways at the Feroz Shah Kotla. It is Kohli’s first appearance in the Ranji Trophy since 2012 and it comes after a rather disastrous run of form in the 2024/25 Test season. The former India captain just 382 runs in 19 innings at a paltry average of 22.47. The poor form in red-ball cricket was a bit of a surprise considering how Kohli finished his T20 career with a match-winning knock in the 2024 T20 World Cup final and broke all kinds of record in the 2023 World Cup.

Earlier, former batter Mohammed Kaif, who was in the Uttar Pradesh team that faced Delhi in Kohli’s last Ranji Trophy match, said that the former captain returning to the tournament is good news for everyone and he is hoping that the latter can get a couple of good knocks under his belt before going to the 2025 Champions Trophy. “Him playing Ranji Trophy is a win-win for everyone. He will get some practice, can score runs and that will be beneficial for India. So I hope he scores and gets some runs and at the Champions Trophy his bat works just the way it did during the 2023 World Cup,” said Kaif.

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