Not every country in the world plays the same amount of international cricket. The proportion of some of the countries is quite higher, particularly in test and ODI cricket. It’s fair to say players of the big cricketing nations get more opportunities to add to their runs’ tally before the age of 30, but whatever amount of cricket one plays, it’s not easy to complete the tally of 10,000 international runs before the age of 30.
However, some elite cricketers in the world have managed to achieve that feat and they didn’t just stop there, but went on to cross many more barriers after the age of 30.
Here are the 3 batsmen with most international runs before the age of 30 –
Sachin Tendulkar
Sachin Tendulkar being the no. 1 in this list won’t surprise anyone because he made his international debut only at the age of 16 and after making his debut, he remained a regular feature in India colors in both red ball and white ball cricket. Tendulkar is one of those rare cricketers in the world who never got dropped from his national team and he missed matches for India only due to injury or when he was rested.
Sachin Tendulkar, before he turned 30-year old, had already crossed the tally of 20,000 international runs in 474 innings across formats.
Virat Kohli
Virat Kohli didn’t make his debut in international cricket quite as early as Tendulkar, but he was also fast-tracked into the Indian team straight after he won the U19 World Cup for India in 2008. The selectors got a glimpse of Virat’s ability in that U19 World Cup and he was drafted into the emerging players’ set-up and India A squad, before finally being given the opportunity to play for the senior team of India within a year.
Virat, like Tendulkar, has also been a heavy run scorer for India right since the start of his career and that too in both red ball and white ball cricket. Before Virat celebrated his 30th birthday, he had scored 18665 international runs for India in 390 innings across formats.
Jacques Kallis
Jacques Kallis’ name being here is remarkable because he was not just the specialist batsman for South Africa. Kallis was an allrounder who had his fair share of bowling workload, but despite that, Kallis scored as many runs for South Africa as any top order batsman would score and then took plenty of wickets too.
Kallis had 15,123 runs to his name in 368 international innings before he got to the age of 30.
