Haha, excluding the runs as 1st opener because he didn't like it?
I'd prefer not to come in at 2/10, but I don't get a choice in it - maybe I can exclude that from my stats?
No, because he just didn't play in that particular position very often (<10% of his overall innings if I'm correct), and he clearly played a substantial amount of matches at #2 (nearly 300 innings, which is longer than both ABs and Kohli's career).
For a fair comparison, here's Kohli's stats at #3:
148 innings | 7,495 runs | 61.43 Ave | 93.29 SR | 24 MoM
Runs per innings: 50.6
His average increases by 3 (not a huge amount) and his SR by just over 1. It's not a huge change for Kohli.
It's clearly a HUGE change for Sachin. I don't buy the 'his move up to #2 just coincided with when he became a top player' argument necessarily, because although he was young, he had shown plenty of fantastic innings in tests prior to that but struggled in ODIs to an extent. For some reason though, #2 suited him down to a tee, as his stats show.
Until 1994 (before moving up to #2), he was averaging 31.09.
Taking all positions except #2, in 159 innings total his average is only 34.10 (29 runs per innings). There's a very marked difference.
I'm not 100% sure what AB's split of positions is (anyone care to enlighten?), so just doing an overall runs per innings: 43.93
Edit: seems to be 4 (just under half the matches) but no real change from his actual statistics
Anything but 1 and 2 seems to bring about a +5 average and a +1 SR.
He's a real beast at 5 - average of 77.96 in 42 innings at a SR of nearly 109.
It's just interesting, if anything.