Shared smiles that grew the legend of Kohli

The India captain and Rizwan knew they had done their best and one of them had to lose.

Virat Kohli inherited a spotless record against Pakistan in World Cups. That record is now chequered. His legacy includes being the first Indian captain to lose to Pakistan in a men’s World Cup.

India's captain Virat Kohli shares a light moment while congratulating Pakistan's Mohammad Rizwan after Pakistan won ICC men's Twenty20 World Cup cricket match against India, at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, in Dubai on Sunday.(ANI )

And yet, by the end of it, Kohli was all smiles.

A post-loss Virat Kohli smiling widely as he embraced a beaming Mohammed Rizwan was the Moment of the Match for me. It beat Shaheen Afridi’s thrice-over starman pose and Babar Azam’s backfoot punch through cover point. At the end, I could not look away from the smiles the two men in two colours had.

For too long, the Indo-Pak rivalry in World Cups has been predictably one-sided. You have to go back to the 2011 World Cup for the last time Pakistan were competitive. Aside from the Champions Trophy final, the last decade has seen India dominate with controlled, professional performances while Pakistan seemed too often caught up in the noise around the encounter, falling prey to the hype of their own fans.

Sunday was different. It was a complete performance from Pakistan. They were inspired at the start, bowled bravely when India counterattacked, and finished well. Aside from one overthrow, there was not a blemish in their fielding. And with the bat, everytime India knocked, Rizwan and Azam slammed the door shut. We don’t often say this with Indo-Pak World Cup games, but this was a cold, clinical, professional, performance by the neighbour.

And what we saw at the end was an extension of that professionalism. Kohli and Rizwan greeting each other as professionals, knowing they had each done their best and one of them had to lose.

It’s the kind of moment we have grown used to seeing in cricket. Think Shimron Hetmeyer piggybacking on Dwayne Bravo in this IPL, after guiding his team home. Think about the bromance between Kohli and Glenn Maxwell in Australia last year, having been teammates at the IPL just before that. But those friendships are born of dressing rooms shared, with borders thinning thanks to franchise cricket. For India and Pakistan, the cricket border has never been as thick.

And so the camaraderie between Kohli and Rizwan was unexpected, and all the more heartwarming. Sport is not war, even without the bullets. Modern sport is entertainment, and the modern athlete understands that the best entertainment sometimes comes when crude emotion is bottled.

The respect I saw reminded me of my time in Pakistan. In 2005, I had the privilege of touring Lahore, as part of the India Under-21 side. I remember shopkeepers who wouldn’t take our money because we were their guests, and the Pakistani player who gifted me her cap as a memento. I remember going to the Pakistani players’ rooms after the series was done (we beat them 4-0), and seeing one player without her hijab for the first time, and staring at tanlines very unlike mine. But there was a lot of respect between both teams and both sets of administrators; not because we were professional sportspeople (far from it). We recognised that each side was doing all it can to grow the women’s game. Later that year, the senior Indian team toured Karachi and came back with similar stories.

Those memories jar against social media trends as I write this. Is there a rule that links inspiration to the colour of a shirt? Or can we learn from Pakistan’s Kainat Imtiaz? Imtiaz was a ball girl in 2005 when Jhulan Goswami played that tour in Karachi. She was inspired to bowl fast, eventually opening the bowling for Pakistan in the 2017 World Cup. The women’s rivalry can teach us so much: In 2016, after beating India in the T20 World Cup match in Delhi, Pakistan captain Sana Mir asked her team to keep the celebrations in check, out of consideration for the Indian catering staff who were attending to them in the dressing room.

Respect, like professionalism, is a learned behaviour. Babar, speaking to his team after the game, exhorted them to not slip back after rising: “Over excited mat hona please, main aap sab se request karta hu… Yahi hamari adat hai, ye change karni hai hume. Mujhe sab me najar aa raha hai ki ahista ahista ye change ho raha hai. Ye hum log hi karenge, aur koi nahi karega.”

They are learning, changing. I don’t expect athletes to be moral role models, but there is much to learn in all we saw after the last run was scored on Sunday.

Kohli inherited a spotless record against Pakistan in World Cups. That record is now chequered. And yet, his legacy and legend is now richer for the smiles he shared.