The current generation is blessed to witness the greatness of India’s Virat Kohli and Australia’s Steve Smith. Both of them has been a tremendous ambassador of the game taking batting to a whole new level. Meanwhile, the spectrum has found itself into two halves while picking the best among the two, and recently legendary South Africa batsman AB de Villiers also joined the bandwagon.
Kohli and Smith have been leading the debate making all the good noises with the bat. Both of them have scored consistently on all parts of the globe to lead their country. Virat Kohli currently is the only batsman to average over 50 in all three formats. He already has 70 international hundreds – 43 in ODIs and 27 in Tests. Furthermore, Kohli features in the top 10 if ICC rankings for batsmen in all three formats while hogging the No.1 spot in ODIs.
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Recently, AB de Villiers weighed on the debate and came up with a tricky answer. The former Proteas star, who is a close friend of Virat Kohli did not clearly mention who he thinks is the better batsman but compared them with Tennis greats Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
“It’s a difficult one, but Virat is definitely the more natural ball-striker, there’s no doubt about that,” de Villiers said during his interaction on ‘Sports Hurricane’,” AB de Villiers said to an Instagram chat with former Zimbabwe seamer Pommie Mbangwa.
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“In tennis terms, I’d say he’s more like a (Roger) Federer whereas Smith is like a (Rafael) Nadal. Smith is mentally very strong, and figures out a way of scoring runs – he doesn’t look natural, but he ends up writing records and doing amazing things at the crease. “I think mentally Smith is one of the best I have ever seen. Virat has also scored runs all over the world and won games under pressure,” he concluded.
Recently, Steve Smith leapfrogged Virat Kohli to sit on the top of the ICC Test Rankings. He scored runs at will in the last Ashes knocking 774 runs from seven innings including three centuries and fifties each.
