Virat Kohli vs Shubman Gill Stats: Test, ODI, T20I & IPL
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Cricket in India8 min read
Every comparison between Virat Kohli and Shubman Gill has the same defect: one of the two careers is finished and the other is roughly a fifth of the way through. Kohli played 562 international matches; Gill has played about 145. Any ledger that puts their totals side by side and declares a winner is measuring elapsed time.
Adjust for that and something more interesting appears. Gill's One-Day International average of 60.33 is currently higher than Kohli's career figure of 58.59 — a number nobody expected any Indian batter to be looking at. His eleven Test hundreds have come in 41 matches, a rate faster than Kohli managed across 123. His highest ODI score, 208, exceeds Kohli's 183, and his highest Test score, 269, exceeds Kohli's 254 not out. He captains India in both those formats and he is not yet 27.
Against all of that: Kohli's records are proven across eighteen years and four continents, and Gill's have not yet survived a bad two-year run of the kind that took eight runs off Kohli's Test average. This page compares the rates rather than the totals, and says plainly what would have to happen for the comparison to become real.
Where the two records stand
| Format | Kohli (career, complete except ODIs) | Gill (career to date) |
|---|---|---|
| Tests | 123 matches, 9,230 runs at 46.85, 30 hundreds | 41 matches, 2,969 runs at 44.31, 11 hundreds |
| ODIs | 314 matches, 14,941 runs at 58.59, 54 hundreds | 67 matches, 3,379 runs at 60.33, 9 hundreds |
| T20Is | 125 matches, 4,188 runs at 48.69, 1 hundred | 36 matches, 869 runs at 28.03, 1 hundred |
| First-class | 156 matches, 11,485 runs at 48.05 | 71 matches, 5,677 runs at 50.68 |
| IPL | 9,336 runs, nine hundreds | 134 matches, 4,598 runs at 40.33, five hundreds |
| Highest score | 254 not out (Test), 183 (ODI), 122 not out (T20I) | 269 (Test), 208 (ODI), 126 not out (T20I) |
Kohli's figures are as of 19 July 2026 and Gill's as of 23 June 2026; the IPL totals run to the end of the 2026 season. Kohli's Test and T20I careers are closed. Every one of Gill's rows is live.
Tests: a better rate, a fifth of the volume
Gill averages 44.31 to Kohli's 46.85 and has eleven hundreds from 41 matches to Kohli's 30 from 123 — a conversion rate meaningfully better than Kohli's over the whole career, though not better than Kohli's peak.
The single innings-cluster that carries most of Gill's Test record is the 2025 series in England. Captaining India for the first time in the format, he made 754 runs in five Tests, the most any captain has made in an away Test series, passing Garry Sobers' 722 in England in 1966. He was India's player of the series. That is not a slow accumulation across easy conditions; it is the hardest away assignment in the calendar, done in the first series of a captaincy.
The comparison Kohli's supporters make is about durability, and it is the right one. Kohli made Test hundreds in seven countries across a decade, went through a technical crisis and a five-year decline, and still finished at 46.85. Nobody yet knows what Gill's number looks like after a bad twelve months, because he has not had one in the format. The Test cricket history page has the longer view of how Indian top-order careers tend to bend.
ODIs: the number that makes the comparison interesting
An average above 60 across 67 matches is the strongest start any Indian ODI batter has made. Gill's nine hundreds include a 208 against New Zealand at Hyderabad in 2023, and he now leads the side in the format.
Kohli's 58.59 across 314 matches is the more substantial achievement by a very large margin, and the reason is obvious: the sample. An average of 60 over 67 innings is one bad World Cup away from 54; an average of 58.59 over 300-plus matches has already absorbed every bad month a career contains. Kohli also passed Sachin Tendulkar's mark of 49 ODI hundreds, made 765 runs at the 2023 World Cup — more than anybody has made in a single edition — and holds the best chasing record in the format's history.
What is genuinely new is that an Indian batter is running above Kohli's rate at all. The history of India's ODI cricket has plenty of batters who started fast; none of them has started this fast at three or four in the modern era.
T20Is: not close, and the reasons are structural
This is the one format where Kohli is ahead on rate as well as volume, and the gap is wide: 48.69 against 28.03. Gill's 36 T20Is have produced 869 runs and one hundred, the 126 not out against New Zealand at Ahmedabad in 2023 which remains the largest score of his international career in any format until you get to Test cricket.
Two structural things sit behind the gap. Gill has never had a settled T20I place, partly because India's T20 top order has been crowded and partly because the side's selection in the format has favoured higher strike rates than his early international T20 game produced. Kohli, by contrast, batted at three in almost every T20I he played for a decade and was the format's most reliable accumulator; his average is the highest of any batter with that volume.
It is also the format where Kohli's career is complete and Gill's is arguably yet to begin. India's T20I side is now led by a different captain and built around different players, and how much T20I cricket Gill plays while carrying the Test and ODI captaincies is an open question.
IPL: the same franchise pattern, twenty years apart
Kohli has 9,336 IPL runs, all for Royal Challengers Bengaluru, more than anybody has made in the competition, with nine hundreds and the single-season record of 973 in 2016.
Gill has 4,598 runs at 40.33 with five hundreds, and he is captain of Gujarat Titans. His 2023 season produced 890 runs and the Orange Cap; in 2026 he made 722 at 48.1 with a strike rate above 160, which is the strongest combination of volume and rate he has managed in the tournament. At his current pace he is on course to be one of the competition's leading run-scorers by the end of the decade, though so was almost everybody who has ever had two good seasons.
Captaincy: the same age, a harder start
The symmetry here is close enough to be worth setting out. Kohli became India's Test captain in December 2014, at 26, when MS Dhoni retired mid-series in Australia. He went on to captain 68 Tests and win 40 of them, the best record any India captain has had, and never won a global tournament.
Gill was given the Test captaincy in May 2025, at 25, ahead of the series in England, and the ODI captaincy later the same year. He began by making 754 runs in his first series as Test captain. He has also captained through a difficult red-ball period for India, including a home series defeat by South Africa, which is the sort of run that ends careers in the job. The record of India's Test captains puts both in context, and the page on India's coaches covers the support structure around the current side.
What would make the comparison real
Three things, and none of them is a matter of opinion.
Volume in Tests. Gill needs roughly 6,000 more Test runs to reach Kohli's total, which at his current rate is another eight or nine years of red-ball cricket in a schedule that keeps compressing it.
An away record across conditions. The 2025 series in England is a genuine credential. Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are not yet on the list, and Kohli's Test hundreds are spread across all of them.
A bad patch survived. Every long career contains two or three years in which the method stops working and has to be rebuilt. Kohli's is on the record and cost him eight runs of average. Gill's has not happened, and how his numbers look afterwards is the only honest test of whether the current rates mean anything.
Verdict, stated with the caveat attached
- Career totals in every format: Kohli, and it is not a comparison so much as an arithmetic difference in years played.
- Current ODI average: Gill, by a small margin over a fifth of the sample.
- ODI average over a full career: Kohli, and nothing about Gill's 67 matches challenges it yet.
- Test hundreds per match: Gill, at this stage.
- Test durability, away spread and proven peak: Kohli.
- Highest scores in Tests and ODIs: Gill.
- T20 international record: Kohli, decisively.
- IPL runs and records: Kohli; Gill has the trajectory and the captaincy.
The individual pages for Virat Kohli and Shubman Gill carry each career in detail, the player directory has the rest of the current side, and the cricket in India hub covers the transition between the two generations.
Sources and method
Kohli's international figures are as of 19 July 2026 and Gill's as of 23 June 2026, both from ESPNcricinfo career records cross-checked against the career-statistics summaries on their Wikipedia entries. IPL totals run to the end of the 2026 season on 31 May 2026. Gill's records are live in every format and the numbers above will date faster than anything else on this page.
The 754-run series figure and the comparison with Garry Sobers' 722 in England in 1966 are as reported by Wisden and ESPNcricinfo at the time of the 2025 series. Single-season IPL figures for Gill's 2023 and 2026 campaigns come from the same sources.
Everything in the section on what would make the comparison real is projection, clearly labelled as such, and no forecast of Gill's eventual totals is offered. The observation that a 67-match average is more volatile than a 300-match one is arithmetic rather than opinion; the judgement about which record is more impressive at this stage is opinion, and is separated out above. Figures current as of 27 August 2026.