A file image of Virat Kohli.
Team India captain Virat Kohli will look to add another feather to his already illustrious cap when India take on England in the first of the five-match Test series, starting in Birmingham on Wednesday. Kohli, who is the number-two ranked Test batsman in the world, is just 23 runs short of achieving 1,000 runs against England.
Kohli has so far scored 977 runs against England at an average of 44.40 and he will be the 13th Indian cricketer to reach the 1,000-run mark when he attains the milestone.
Batting maestro Sachin Tendulkar is topping the list with 2535 runs, including seven hundreds and 13 fifties. His average stands at an impressive 51.73.
Sunil Gavaskar (2483), Rahul Dravid (1950), Gundappa Viswanath (1880), Dilip Vengsarkar (1589), Kapil Dev (1355), Mohammad Azharuddin (1278), Vijay Manjrekar (1181), Mahendra Singh Dhoni (1157), Farokh Engineer (1113), Cheteshwar Pujara (1061) and Ravi Shastri (1026) are the other Indian cricketers on the list.
Meanwhile, Kohli, who is leading India for the first time in a bilateral series against England in England, will also look to become the number one batsman in the International Cricket Council (ICC) Test rankings during the five-Test series.
Kohli trails Smith, who is currently serving a 12-month ban due to his role in the ball-tampering fiasco in Cape Town Test earlier this year, by 26 points and will have to produce a string of strong performances to leapfrog the Australian.
England remains the only place where Kohli has poor numbers. In his last tour to England in 2014, Kohli failed miserably as he scored just 134 runs in five Tests at an average of 13.40.
This time the 29-year-old will look to erase the memories of 2014 with a string of good scores.
