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Virat Kohli Joins Steve Smith In Elite Club With World Cup Final Fifty vs Australia

Aakash Saini

image-lp5f3tqrVirat Kohli in action at the 2023 World Cup final (AP)

Virat Kohli punched out 54 tense runs against Australia at the 2023 World Cup final after having made an early arrival to the crease. Scoring carefree runs with a rampaging Rohit Sharma at the other end, Kohli employed a cautious approach with the bat thereafter to stitch a fighting 67-run partnership with KL Rahul.

Notably, the 35-year-old notched up his ninth fifty-plus score of the tournament and extended his World Cup 2023 tally to 765 runs. Through the course of his latest effort against Australia, Kohli entered an elite World Cup batting club featuring the likes of Steve Smith and former cricketers Aravinda de Silva and Javed Miandad.

Virat Kohli joins rare World Cup batting club

Virat Kohli scored 54 against Australia in the 2023 World Cup final, mere days after pounding 117 runs against New Zealand in the semis. In doing so, the seasoned campaigner became only the seventh cricketer in history to register fifty-plus scores in both the semifinal and the final of a single edition of a World Cup.

Kohli’s Australian counterpart Steve Smith, who is also playing the 2023 final in Ahmedabad, was the last batter to scale the twin landmark fifties at the grandest stage back during the 2015 semifinal and final. Here is a look at all seven cricketers with fifty-plus scores in the final two knockout fixtures of a World Cup edition.

Players with 50-plus scores in Semifinal and Final of a World Cup:

Batters
World Cup Edition
Mike Brearley1979
David Boon1987
Javed Miandad1992
Aravinda de Silva1996
Grant Elliot2015
Steve Smith2015
Virat Kohli2023

Virat Kohli also broke Sachin Tendulkar’s record of scoring the most runs in a single edition of a World Cup through his match-winning 117 against New Zealand in Mumbai. Tendulkar scored 673 runs back in 2003 across 11 innings, while Kohli finished his 2023 batting crusade with 765 runs to his name.