Kohli turns 38 today, and his ODI strike rate at 37 was 119 against 93 for the rest of his career
In the year since his last birthday, Virat Kohli has made 928 ODI runs at 84.36 and hit 30 sixes in 13 innings, scoring at 119 runs per 100 balls.
Nov 5, 2026
Virat Kohli is 38 today. The year he has just finished as a 37-year-old was one of the most productive of his ODI career, and by some distance the fastest.
Between his 37th birthday on 5 November 2025 and Wednesday’s win at Eden Park, Kohli batted 13 times in ODIs. He made 928 runs at an average of 84.36, with four hundreds and five fifties. He scored them at 119.43 runs per 100 balls. In the 293 ODI innings he played before that birthday, his strike rate was 93.26.
That is a jump of 26 runs per 100 balls, made in his late thirties.
The numbers, year by year
Kohli has never been slow in ODIs, but he has rarely been quick by today’s standards. Before 2026, his best strike rate in any calendar year was 102.6, in 2018. In the ten innings he has played in 2026 it is 120.6.
The sixes tell the same story. He hit 152 of them in those first 293 innings, about one every other game. In the 13 innings since his 37th birthday he has hit 30. His 18 sixes in 2026 are already his second-highest for a calendar year, behind the 24 he hit in 2023, and he still has four ODIs left in New Zealand.
Some of the innings stand out on their own. He hit 139 not out off 88 balls against West Indies in Thiruvananthapuram in September, with nine sixes, the most he has ever hit in an ODI innings. He made 135 off 120 balls against South Africa at Ranchi last November and 124 off 108 against New Zealand in Indore in January.
Auckland was the latest example
On Wednesday, India’s target at Eden Park was cut to 143 from 32 overs after rain. Kohli made 74 off 51 balls with 13 fours, and the pull shot did a lot of the work against New Zealand’s quicks. India won by five wickets with 56 balls to spare.
ESPNcricinfo’s Karthik Krishnaswamy wrote afterwards that Kohli had embraced risk, and counted 10 false shots in his first 27 balls. He kept swinging anyway. The Kohli most of us grew up watching would have got in, worked the ones and twos, and let the asking rate come to him. This one goes looking for it.
One format, one target
Part of the explanation is probably simple. Kohli now plays only ODIs. He retired from T20Is after the 2024 T20 World Cup final and from Test cricket in May 2025, and he has said the 2027 World Cup in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia will be his last.
One format should leave him fresher for the games he does play, and the long gaps between series have not slowed him down. He went from January to July without an ODI this year, came back at Edgbaston with 5, and then made 65 and 74 in the next two games against England.
He passed 15,000 ODI runs during the West Indies series and now has 15,183 in 318 matches, with 55 hundreds. Only Sachin Tendulkar has more ODI runs.
The obvious question about a 38-year-old is how long he can keep going. The more interesting one, on this evidence, is what took him so long to bat like this. The next chance to watch him try is the second ODI in Wellington, which starts at 7:30am IST on Saturday.