Virat Kohli vs Sachin's records : Can he or can he not?

#5 Highest run aggregate in international cricket

Sachin played only one T20I ever, his and India's debut game in the format. Since then T20 cricket has come a long way. It has become as much a part of international calendar as ODIs and Tests. It is the main money-making machine for cricket boards across the world. The number of T20 internationals would only rise in coming years. It is as inevitable as climate change, albeit in a much shorter time frame.

Sachin aggregated 34,357 international runs in his career. Virat is at 15,631. He is still about 1500 runs short of the half-way mark.

The previous analysis of Test and ODI runs puts him at 31,500 runs at the end of his career, T20Is excluded. He currently sits at 1956 runs in T20Is. If he is to play for 8-9 years more, he can easily triple this number.

Any calculation here seems trivial. If both the previous estimates of Test and ODI runs come true and add to that the runs he would score in T20Is, Virat Kohli might become the first man on the planet to touch the 35,000 run mark in international cricket and go well beyond.

Bonus: 100 international hundreds

Our conservative estimate put Virat Kohli at 45 Test hundreds. In ODIs, we estimated him to score 55 hundreds or thereabouts. If he scores beyond our expectations, he would touch the 100 international hundreds mark in these two formats alone.

There might be some T20I hundreds on the way too. He has already scored 18 half-centuries in the format. He has 4 IPL hundreds to his name. A T20I hundred for Virat Kohli is just a question of when, not if.

So if we take a moment aside and think 'Can Virat Kohli scale the Eversest that Sachin created? Can he go where only God of Cricket has gone before him?' My conscious says, yes he can.

Will he? That's a story we all are waiting to watch unfold.