bhaveshgor wrote:To be fair you can argue Kohli captaincy won the series.
if Dhoni captained here would have easily been a draw or worse Sri lanka win.
Also in a low scoring series an average of 38 isn't bad.
Also kohli scored an 50 in the 2nd test when india were 12/2.
Generally in this series barring the galle 2nd innings, whenever india needed runs someone stood up.
would take Kohli performance over Smith who literally scored all his run in 2 test matches.
Seeing how tight this series was you can literally say if Kohli averaged 10 india would have lost the series.
Anyway all this shows how sometimes averages in a small sample size can be misleading.
Firstly, we are talking about the batting. Bringing in Kohli's captaincy (which I don't think was good anyway but thats a different debate) to justify that he had a better series with the bat than Smith is laughable. Both have had their issues vs the moving ball. The difference is Kohli struggled against Prasad, Pradeep and Mathews, Smith was up against Anderson, Broad and Finn. Slight difference in quality, if I may add. And both of Smith's tons were match defining unlike Kohli, who was at best BCCI's 5th or 6th most important player in the win in the 2nd Test and a total non-entity in the 3rd. Smith was also the first Australian to aggregate 500 runs in an away Ashes in 18 years. Won 2 Man of the Match awards. Only the 5th touring batsman to score a double hundred in England since the turn of the century. Describing it as "nothing" whilst hyping up a guy who averaged 38 against a modest attack in a neighbouring country and contributed less to BCCI's wins than Rohit Sharma in this series seems a trifle disingenuous even by your standards.