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The most telling figures in the chart above are those produced by Richards, who scored a century once every 15 innings. In these games, other players made centuries once every 55 innings. Richards scored at 90 runs per hundred balls where other top-order players managed 62.5 runs per hundred balls.

In the present decade, in which Kohli has made 29 of his 30 hundreds in 173 innings, Amla has 24 hundreds in 132 innings, and de Villiers has 20 in 124. David Warner has 13 hundreds in 87 innings, Quinton de Kock 12 in 85, Shikhar Dhawan 11 in 89, Joe Root 10 in 87, Ross Taylor 14 in 109, and Rohit Sharma 13 in 119. It is early in his career, but Babar Azam has racked up five hundreds in his first 31 ODI innings. Every major team seems to have at least one player who could potentially post numbers like Kohli has.

The same could not be said of teams in Tendulkar's era, especially once Tendulkar began to open the batting. Kohli has a strong claim to being first among equals, but the numbers do not support the idea that he is a class apart from his ODI contemporaries in the way that Richards and Tendulkar were from theirs. Today's ODI batting numbers look impressive, but they need to be considered in context. When many players achieve similar numbers, the best numbers in this set are not exceptional.