The Threshold for Greatness Changes

For decades, 10,000 Test runs was cricket’s sacred line.

Cross it, and you entered a different room in history. It separated the merely excellent from the immortals. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, Ricky Ponting, Alastair Cook - the club itself became shorthand for batting greatness.

But sport evolves. And when sport evolves, the thresholds for greatness evolve with it.

Football once had a similar problem. Before 1995, the Ballon d’Or was restricted to European players. That meant Pelé and Diego Maradona were ineligible for the sport’s biggest individual honour during their primes. The rules eventually changed because excluding names of that magnitude made the criteria look incomplete.

Cinema did the same with Charlie Chaplin. The Oscars eventually had to correct themselves with honorary recognition because history could not seriously tell the story of film while leaving Chaplin outside its highest institutional validation.

Earlier, winning the World Cup was often seen as the final measure of greatness in football. Though he eventually lifted it in 2022, many people already considered Lionel Messi one of the greatest ever because two decades of brilliance mattered more than a single trophy.

Cricket now faces a similar moment with Virat Kohli.

The game he played was not the game previous generations played. Modern cricketers exist in a year-round cycle of Tests, ODIs, T20Is, franchise leagues, travel, media scrutiny, and relentless athletic demands. Batting across formats today is physically and mentally more taxing than it was for most earlier eras.

And yet, despite that burden, Kohli retired with 9,230 Test runs at an elite average, across conditions, eras, and attacks. Any honest list of Test batting greats is incomplete without him.

Which raises the obvious question:

If a threshold excludes someone universally accepted as great, is the threshold still correct?

Maybe the number was never sacred. Maybe it was only symbolic.

For this era, the line can no longer be 10,000 test runs.

Now, the threshold for greatness most certainly is 9,230.