This idea slapped me while scrolling cricket forums yesterday – folks screaming “Kohli’s the ODI king!” versus “Smith owns Tests!” till my eyes crossed. Hell, I wanted cold numbers to settle it, not keyboard wars. So I grabbed my laptop, cracked open Excel, and decided to bust this myth myself.
Grabbing the Raw Stats (What a Mess!)
First step? Finding reliable player data for both formats. Searched ESPN and ICC sites like a madman:
- Sachin Tendulkar (Obviously – the OG run machine)
- Virat Kohli (Everyone’s modern ODI hero)
- Ricky Ponting (Australian run monster)
- Kumar Sangakkara (Silky smooth scorer)
- Joe Root & Steve Smith (Current Test freaks)
- Rohit Sharma (ODI beast mode lately)
Damn, copying-pasting all this into my spreadsheet took ages. Formatting was all over the place too – random extra columns, merged cells, the works. Spent a solid hour just cleaning it up so the numbers actually lined up properly. Annoying as hell.
Sorting & Seeing the Divide
Once the data looked semi-human readable, I sorted everything by most ODI runs first. Boom – Kohli rocketed near the top, Tendulkar miles ahead like expected. Rohit wasn’t far behind either. ODI runs stacking up nicely for these guys.
Then I flipped it – sorted purely by Test runs. Total shift. Sangakkara and Ponting climbed high, like always. But then Steve Smith, the weirdo with that stance? His Test average absolutely CRUSHED Virat’s. Root hung in there too. Felt like discovering hidden treasure seeing how their Test runs just piled up differently.
Had to make a separate column just for difference (ODI runs minus Test runs). Pure curiosity. Kohli’s ODI-Test gap was way bigger than Sachin’s – almost 4000 extra ODI runs! Sangakkara was surprisingly close across formats. Makes you realize how damn hard that balance is.
The Ugly Truth Slaps Me in the Face
Sitting back staring at the numbers, the pattern screamed loud and clear:
- ODI Kings: Kohli, Sharma, Ponting, Tendulkar – their ODI mountains are huge.
- Test Beasts: Smith, Root, Sangakkara, Ponting (again!), Tendulkar (duh) – their Test totals just feel… weightier.
And Ponting/Sachin? Freaks of nature, basically. Sitting comfortably in the “Top Whatever” club for BOTH formats. No wonder they’re legends. This whole exercise confirmed the gut feeling – excelling massively in one format doesn’t guarantee domination in the other. The specialist vs. all-round legend divide is real. Stats don’t bloody lie, even if my spreadsheet almost died trying to prove it.
