It has sort of become a template now. Virat Kohli walks out to bat, takes his time to assess the situation, scores a century while breaking a plethora of records and India registers a comfortable victory.
The ordeal was the same in the second ODI at Port of Spain when the captain won the toss and chose to bat first. Shikhar Dhawan departed early and Kohli joined Rohit out in the middle.
After scoring 19 runs, Kohli went past Pakistani legend Javed Miandad to become the highest scorer against West Indies. While Miandad took 64 innings to score 1930 runs against Windies, Kohli got past this record in just 34 innings.
It is a stunning feat as this record stood untouched for almost 26 years.
Went past Sourav Ganguly
During the innings, he also went past former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly to become India's 2nd highest-run getter in the ODIs. In his 50-over career, Ganguly scored 11,353 runs in 311 ODIs. Kohli, who is only playing his 238th match in the format, crossed the total during the 32nd over when he smashed Jason Holder for a boundary towards third man.
He is now only behind Sachin Tendulkar, who finished his career with 18,426 runs in 463 ODIs. Overall, he is 8th in the list of players with most runs in the ODI format.
When he was eventually dismissed for 120, it became the highest ODI score by any captain in West Indies. He went past Brian Lara's 116, which was scored against Sri Lanka at Bridgetown back in 2003.
"Feels good to get a hundred when the team wanted me to get one. Shikhar and Rohit didn't get a big one. One of the top three has always got the big one. A senior man had to step up and today was my opportunity to step up. It was important to string in a lot of dot balls," Kohli said at the end of the match.
Virat Kohli scored five consecutive half-centuries during the ICC World Cup but the triple-digit figure was eluding him. Fast bowler Bhuvneshwar Kumar too said at the end of the match that Kohli was desperate to score a century.
"From Virat's expression, you can make out that how badly wanted a hundred. It's not like he was out of form, it was just that he was getting dismissed in the 70s or 80s in the World Cup. The wicket was not easy, when he came back after getting dismissed, he said the wicket is not that easy," Kumar told reporters after the second ODI.
