Dubai: India captain Virat Kohli on Sunday became the top-ranked batsman in Test cricket for the first time in his career as he ended Australian Steven Smith's reign of nearly 32 months.
Kohli scored 149 and 51 in India's 31-run defeat in the first Test in Birmingham against England and has gone up by 31 points, according to an International Cricket Council (ICC) release. Click here for player ratings
Kohli now leads Smith (who had held the top spot since December 2015) by five points but will have to maintain the form in the remaining four Tests to finish the series as the world's highest-ranked batsman.
Tendulkar had joined South Africa's Jacques Kallis in the number one position in January 2011 but had dropped to the second spot following the Jamaica Test in June 2011 after he had missed the three-Test series against the West Indies.
Apart from Kohli and Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Gautam Gambhir, Sunil Gavaskar, Virender Sehwag and Dilip Vengsarkar are the other India batsmen to have achieved number one rankings during their careers.
However, at 934 points, Kohli has become India's highest-ranked batsman, 14th overall, on the all-time tally of points. Kohli had entered the Edgbaston Test on 903 points, 13 points behind Gavaskar, and is now ahead of the ICC Cricket Hall of Famer by 18 points.
Player of the match Sam Curran on the charge in batsmen, bowlers and all-rounders’ rankings
T20 rankings
Windies players go down after 2-1 series reversal, with Evin Lewis dropping out of the top 10 for batsmen.
They won the first Twenty20 International quite comfortably, but the world champions faltered in the face of the big Bangladesh totals in the second and third games to concede the series.
That meant slips in the MRF Tyres ICC T20I Player Rankings for their men, and gains for the visiting players who helped script the triumph.
For the Bangladeshis, Shakib Al Hasan (103 runs) and Tamim Iqbal (95 runs) were the main batting heroes, and they moved up eight spots to No.45 and six places to No.39 respectively on the table for batsmen.