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It wasn’t Kohli at his peak, yet it was peak Kohli
He is the grounded square above which the magical shapes of the Indian batting float about, writes Rahul Bhattacharya
It began as a sequence as Kohli-esque as possible. He watched the ball on to his bat, turned it behind square, calibrated for a two, ran very hard, made the perfect turn, sprinted back for the second. Except now, Virat Kohli, having completed an astonishing 50th one-day century, kept going towards the clubhouse, jumped to the skies, fell to his knees, let his bat drop to the grass, and his head in his hands, took off his helmet, his gloves, stood up and soaked the hell out of the moment.
He bowed towards Sachin Tendulkar, the hero whose record he had broken – smashed might be more accurate, given that he did it in 183 innings fewer. To Anuskha Sharma he blew a kiss. When he had gathered himself he acknowledged the rest of the Wankhede, which remained standing and chanting and applauding. It would be a while till the capacity crowd sat down again. They included David Beckham, Madhuri Dixit and Rajinikanth.
As Kohli prepared to resume, one could feel the exhaustion from the milestone. But then to watch Kohli is to feel tired on his behalf – I’m not sure he does it for himself.
All those sprinted runs – nearly 8,000 of them, in fact, in one-day cricket alone, if you remove the fours and sixes from his aggregate, and also ignore all the thousands of runs he has for his partners. All that lunging, pressing, interval training, compound-lifting, stretching, warming up, cooling down, all that not-eating of pointless carbs, or cheat meals, or his favourite chhole bhature, or dessert altogether, all that consumption of lean meats, then the elimination of those also (too much acid), all that maintaining of protein and fat in just the right proportion for the optimum combination of explosive strength and endurance and quick recovery, all that flaring open of the jaws and roaring, and celebrating by cussing, staring at an opponent while doing so, all that pumping of the fists and bursting of blood vessels, all that beard grooming, brand endorsing, and articulate self-presentation in all that Star Sports programming, all these centuries, for godsake, all that being Kohli – I’m tired just writing it.
To observe him in this innings was to marvel, too, at his mastery of the format. This innings wasn’t Kohli at his peak, yet it was peak Kohli in just how much of a Kohli innings it was. He ran 49 singles and ten doubles. It’s worth lingering on these: the quotidian hard-run singles and doubles that add up towards a Kohli century.
You probably would not remember the two that took him to 47 in the 26th over. How could you? We have seen him run these exact two runs for a decade and a half; this very piece begins with two such. These were sharper, harder still, and are worth remark because Shubman Gill had retired hurt just a couple of overs before with cramp. All through the tournament, and in the Mumbai steam especially, batters have struggled with cramp, Heinrich Klaasen, Glenn Maxwell and Daryl Mitchell among them.
But our phenomenally well-tuned 35-year-old takes it all in his stride. There are batters who might not have considered that two, others still who would have not known it right from the start as he did, some who would have gone for it and found themselves short. Kohli is rarely ever short.
Consider too the single with which he went from 94 to 95. Pushes wide of mid-on, makes a sprint whose lactic burn you can almost see, a tumble at the end as his bat gets stuck in the ground. This is not to illustrate his disregard for the personal landmark. Kohli’s been rather conscious of those all tournament. Sometimes, with a little help, he has gamed the end of India’s run-chases to get to them. Here he was careful in the 90s. But he could take this option, “a risky single”, even while angling for a century precisely because it was a low-to-no risk option for Kohli. It was what he trains for.
In the context of the day, Kohli’s was a grunt innings, but grunt is his work in this line-up.
Not that grunt was all he did. A lovely dab off Boult between two short third men showed off his touch game. A skip down the track and whip for six had no less than Vivian Richards purring in the commentary box. “He’s one of my favourite indi-viduals,” he’d been saying in drawn-out baritone. This one had him oohing and aahing. “How can you do that to Tim Southee? Look how far down he is, he is almost in Southee’s face. Brilliant, ah, brilliant!”
But these were rare moments of artistry for the clinical Kohli so crucial to this team. He is the grounded square above which the magical shapes of the Indian batting float about. It is as true, and perhaps more, that it is their stroke-making that has allowed Kohli the leeway to anchor his way to 711 runs in this competition – another Tendulkar record he demolished, for the most runs scored in a World Cup. Unplannable symmetry: all this on the tenth anniversary of Tendulkar’s final innings, at this stadium too.
“It’s very difficult for me to explain this,” Kohli said in the mid-innings interval, “but if I paint a perfect picture I would want this to be the picture. My life partner, the person I love the most is sitting there, my hero is there…”
Despite his stature in the world game, when Kohli talks about Tendulkar he still sounds like a young fan. “He is perfection when it comes to batting, I am never going to be as good as him,” he had said in Kolkata. And going past Tendulkar in his den, in the city that is Sachin’s and he has made his own, perhaps he should not feel embarrassed if others speak of them in the same breath.
