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Kohli close to rare run-scoring feat

With two matches left in South Africa, Virat Kohli has the 1000-run barrier in his sights

Indian skipper Virat Kohli needs to score 130 runs in his next two T20 innings to join West Indies legend Sir Viv Richards as the only men to have scored 1000 international runs on a single tour.

India's lengthy campaign in South Africa will conclude this week with the second and third T20s, on Wednesday and Friday, bringing to a close the 12-match tour that has featured three Tests, six ODIs and three T20s.

Kohli has been the dominant batsman across all forms of the game and will enter the second T20 in Centurion on Wednesday with 870 runs for the tour.

Richards's memorable 1976 campaign in England remains the only instance of a batsman scoring more than 1000 international runs on a single tour and Kohli could make it a club of two by the weekend.

Despite missing the second match of the five-Test 1976 series due to injury, Richards amassed an incredible 829 runs in the four Tests he did play, including scores of 232, 135 and a memorable 291 in the final Test at the Oval.

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He then added another 216 runs in the three-match ODI series, including an unbeaten 119, to finish the tour with 1045 runs in the seven international games and a total of 2003 runs from 22 matches on the tour as a whole.

The only other player to come close to the 1000-run mark on a single tour was the incomparable Sir Donald Bradman, who tallied 974 runs in just five Tests in Australia's 1930 Ashes campaign in the UK. Bradman batted just seven times in that series, including scores of 334, 254, 232 and 131, and added another three centuries in Australia's four tour matches to finish the campaign with 1664 runs, more than 1000 runs ahead of the other Australian batsmen.

Former Australian skipper Mark Taylor, who scored 839 runs in the six-match Ashes series in 1989, missed a chance to crack the 1000-mark on that tour as he was not considered part of Australia's best one-day team at the time and was overlooked for the three-match ODI series that preceded the Tests.

While Kohli's tally will come from more games (12) than Richards (seven) and Bradman (five), it's nonetheless been a superb tour for the right-hander.

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Having produced a defiant 153 in the three-match Test series, which his side lost 2-1, the right-hander scored 558 runs in the ODIs and was dismissed only three times, his tally including three centuries.

He managed just 26 in the first T20I in Johannesburg, but his career T20I average of 52.15 - which is more than 11 runs better than any other male batsman in history - indicates he's a chance of scoring the 130 runs he needs to reach 1000 this week.