Virat Kohli not yet in the league of Sachin Tendulkar: Ricky Ponting

There’s a raging debate over whether India skipper Virat Kohli is a better batsman than the ‘Master Blaster’ Sachin Tendulkar. While Tendulkar scored over 34,000 runs during his playing career and is the only batsman to make 100 hundreds, Kohli endured an unbelievable 2016.The Delhi batsman scored over 2,500 runs in the last calendar year across all formats and dominated bowlers like never seen before.

Ricky Ponting, who is second in the list of leading Test run-scorers behind Tendulkar, was his closest rival and probably is the best man to give a verdict on the debate. The former Australian skipper feels Kohli is the best one-day batsman in the world but it is not yet time to call him a great of the five-day format.

"Is he the best batsman in the world? Yeah, he probably is. I thought he was six or seven months ago and he's probably taken it to another level since then," Ponting was quoted as saying by the Gulf News.

"He's not the complete, all-round package yet."

Ponting added that it was too early to compare him to the likes of Tendulkar.

"It's too early yet to be taking about him being one of the greats. I think the great players we always talk about the Tendulkars, the Laras, the Kallises those guys played 120, 130-200 Test matches. Virat's not even halfway along that path," he said.

Talking about the upcoming Australia tour of India, Ponting said the visitors will need to get Kohli out of his comfort zone to have any chances of doing well in the four-Test series.

"The one thing about Virat Kohli is whenever there's any confrontation, he does get a little bit outside of his comfort zone. You can see that he gets ultra-aggressive, which may be a good thing for him or maybe good for the opposition," he said.

"We will wait and see what happens. I think he's a similar sort of character to me as well. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He's pretty animated. He's a very aggressive player.

"One thing I learnt about playing in India is the momentum that the home team can create, you have to try and stop that.

"Someone like Virat, you have to take his boundary-scoring areas away and make him score his runs in different areas or make him bat for a longer time to make his runs," he added.