Virat Kohli did things for our Test cricket that appeared impossible
At the end of his Test career, Virat Kohli has planted himself near dead centre of the Indian batting pantheon
Of the many moving words in Virat Kohli’s Instagram retirement announcement, this somehow resonated deepest: “#269signing off”. It is his Test cap number, sandwiched between Jaydev Unadkat and Praveen Kumar; Kohli is part of an unbroken Indian lineage which began from Ladhabhai Nakum Amar Singh at No.1 and has now reached No. 316 Kaki Nitish Kumar Reddy.
In that long list, amidst some of our game’s greatest names, Kohli today leaves his own and that too in neon lights. Las Vegas billboard-style because of who he was, when he played and how he presented himself as an Indian cricketer. At the end of his Test career, Kohli has planted himself near dead centre the Indian batting pantheon, fourth in line behind the biggest of our Test batting Daddies – Tendulkar, Dravid, Gavaskar.
In his prime, Kohli was exemplar of two eras of cricket itself, in his prime shaping himself into the most perfect amalgam of Test and white-ball cricket. With conventional shot-making working alongside an obsession with supreme fitness as a tool for high performance and a means to lengthen a multi-format career.
Kolhi, as captain, also made a deliberate attempt to write a Test script markedly different from his predecessor MS Dhoni’s last few years, demanding that his side be competitive and tough overseas. The accidental captaincy in Australia 2014 was to mark the beginning of Kohli 2.0, as he raised his game and expanded his ambitions. Just as his batting sought to put on an armour of impenetrability, captaincy was to temper his early cricket avatar of a fits-and-start performer who turned into a constantly-exploding on-field firecracker.
Post England 2014 to around end-2019, Kohli did things in and for our Test cricket that appeared impossible not so long ago. His coach Ravi Shastri never lost a chance to call Kohli’s India the country’s greatest Test team ever. Leading India to a series victory in Australia was to be Kohli’s finest hour as captain and player – and it would have gone down as India’s greatest series win ever; had it not been topped by the utterly madcap turnaround of 2020-21.
Retirements mean that our memories start to play out a highlights reel of a cricketer’s careers. This one somehow begins in our heads with Adelaide 2014 with Kohli going after a total of 364, foot on the pedal, headlights on full beam, his 141 putting the heebie-jeebies into Australia. The highlights reel automatically dims Kohli’s Test troubles - like his dipping Test form over the last five seasons and the team’s two consecutive Test series defeats against New Zealand at home and the forgettable Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia. Despite that, Kohli had remained the selectors’ first-choice ‘veteran’ for England over Rohit who was informed of this truth just after Australia itself.
Amongst the SENA countries, England had remained Kohli’s toughest Test overseas opponent. He had missed out on the 2023-24 home series against England due to personal reasons and it was being hoped that his Kohli’s pride and drive could get him going for one last shot across five Tests. That plus being the high-energy Pied Piper to inspire the rest of the younger more inexperienced batters.
If this were an OTT sports movie, Kohli would have been given the captaincy for one last series and would have led the team to another historic series victory. But this is real life and India’s next two-year WTC cycle begins next month where pragmatism will serve a better purpose, clean slates et al.
Like Rohit Sharma, Kohli’s teammate and captain for whom he too once was captain and then teammate, Kohli too will continue to play ODI cricket, his sights on the 2027 ICC World Cup.
This is the format in which both men are the most comfortable, where they first made their names and don’t forget, built considerabe social media presences. Yet, the most facile thing today would be to call up that version of Kohli loved by social-media and the broadcasters’ along withits flurry of shallow nicknames: King Kolhi, Chase Master, Super V forever on HeroCam.
For harried executives looking to recover media-rights costs and social media likes, this is Kohli as the most low-hanging, profitable fruit variety which has done most disservice to Kohli the cricketer over these last few years.
Let us not forget, at every stage and on every platform, Kohli remained a passionate proselytiser for Test cricket, this most demanding, time-consuming and threatened of formats. He took us into his Test bubble with these words: “The quiet grind, the long days, the small moments that no one sees but that stay with you forever.”
Even as T20 lures hundreds of thousands towards the game, Indian cricket’s biggest superstar has never lost an opportunity to send out the message to his faithful of what matters most even today.
We are now at the point where the Indian Test team is now fully ‘transition’-ed. India’s Test cricketers from now on will be products of the Twenty20 generation. They are well-versed in its geometry, its match-ups and its transitory pressures.
Kolhi and his contemporaries built their skills in red-ball cricket and tried to improvise them into a rapidly-shortened format. The team for England instead grew up with white-ball skills being constantly speeded up and sharpened. They must somehow try to adapt themselves into the suffocating expanses of the red-ball game and fit into those forever-tight whites. The retirement and departure of Virat Kohli, whose likes we may never see again in the long game, has also set in motion the sliding doors of Indian cricket.
