Growing Up with Kohli
On Kohli's retirement from test cricket
This is my 5th blog from the series 100-weeks,100-blogs. This time I am writing on Virat Kohli’s test retirement.
Kohli’s test cricket career should have had a happy ending. The first time he played in tests in the summer of 2011 against the West Indies, I remember how disappointed I was seeing him fail. I expected so much from him. My only cricketing idol before Kohli was Sachin. When the media started labelling Kohli as his successor, my admiration shifted to him.
I was in school when India lost 4-0 to England and consequently lost its Test No. 1 ranking. Test matches were already a pain to watch, and Sachin’s bad form made it worse. Again, against the West Indies in the same year, Kohli was reintroduced to the Test side. This time he scored a 50 in each innings of the Test match. It was a good audition for the upcoming tour down under.
The Test team, which used to be the best in the world just six months ago, lost its seventh consecutive foreign Test with just one more Test to go in a series against Australia. In England, at least Dravid got us some runs, but this time we had nothing to celebrate. Neither Sachin scored his 100th hundred, nor did Sehwag do anything magical. Laxman was already looking like a different player, and Dravid was getting bowled more often than before. The remaining of the bits were taken care of by Kohli showing his middle finger to the nasty Australian spectators. I was thinking if the successor could not play like his predecessor, at least he should behave like him.
I had lost all my interest in Test cricket by the time the fourth Test started. Ponting scored a 200 in this Test, and my hopes for Test cricket died when Sachin was again dismissed cheaply in the first innings. But someone else clicked in this match. The same guy who was accused of showing the bird to the crowd was now hurling abuses on live television, this time after scoring his hundred. India lost this Test match as well, but my interest in Test cricket rekindled again after this innings. Not because of the abuses (which looked cool after a 100) or any particular style of celebration, but because of a story. A story of a player who played the match for his state the very next day after losing his father. A story of a player who did not belong in the Test arena, yet he scored his first hundred in Australia, against all odds, when the second highest score from the team was 35.
Kohli was promoted to the no.4 batting spot after Sachin’s retirement. The story continued smoothly for the next two years. The protagonist scores a fluent hundred in South Africa against Steyn, Philander, and Morkel. He saves a Test match in New Zealand with a final-day hundred. The hero is on the rise.
Then came the year 2014 and the tour of England. Enough has already been said about that tour. I won’t go into it. But with that tour, again, I started losing my interest in test cricket. The next challenge was Australia. This time he was the captain.
The first ball from Johnson hit him on his new design helmet. Kohli doesn’t look hurt by this audacity of the red ball. He looks angry. He went on to score 692 runs in the series, and although India lost this series, Kohli’s captaincy seemed to rekindle the missing spark in Indian Test cricket.
I was in college when Kohli toured England for the second time (in Tests). I do not know what he was thinking, but I for sure was nervous as hell when he walked in to face Anderson. Anderson could not get him out in the whole series. Kohli walked out as the Man of the Series. India lost the series 4-1, but two of those matches were really close. This was an improvement compared to previous tours of SENA countries. Even in the tour of South Africa, which happened earlier that year, we never looked outplayed in any of the matches.
In addition to that, India was building a pace attack ! A bowling attack dominated by fast bowlers. I had grown up seeing Zaheer Khan tearing his hamstrings while trying to deadlift India’s bowling attack, and then seeing MS walk up to the stumps to keep against Praveen Kumar. I remember MS, in his typical manner, addressing the lack of pace in his fast bowling options, in a post match presentation in 2011 world cup, by saying, “Ashish is a ‘Rhythm’ bowler who bowls consistently at 138. The rest hold a tight line and length” (or something like that. I don’t remember anything else, but I clearly remember Ashish Nehra being called a Rhythm bowler). Some may say Kohli was lucky to lead the team in an era of Shami and Bumrah. I can say the vice versa can be true as well.
In the next two years, until COVID happened, our hero kept on rising with just a little hiccup of a two-Test match loss against New Zealand. Nobody noticed it. The world went into quarantine for the next few months.
I am not talking about Kohli’s white-ball career here. I think he has left nothing to prove there. He never had a struggling patch of more than a series or two in white ball. Even when he had trouble scoring runs, he was scoring below the standards that he set for himself over the years. Also, I do not think there will be such an outpouring of emotions when he says goodbye to ODIs.
ODIs are his comfort format. Whenever he was out of touch in any format, he would play a couple of ODI series, and boom, he would be back amongst runs. I still think if India had kept on playing the number of ODIs it used to in the 2000s and 2010s, or even half of that, the story could have been different. For example, in the year 2023, he played around 20-25 ODIs and averaged 50+ in Tests that year.
Post-COVID era Kohli was different. It was painful to watch him bat in Test cricket. It became even more painful when he left the Test captaincy. I still think Ganguly and the selectors could have handled the situation better.
Kohli’s legacy does not lie in those 9,200+ runs and 40 out of 68 Test wins. Some other captain might come along and perhaps win more matches than Kohli. Some batsman or another will come and score more runs than Kohli at No. 4. His legacy lies in the fact that a whole generation of people like me started appreciating Test cricket. His legacy lies in his struggles.
Watching Sachin struggle for more than two years at the end of his career was painful and sad. But watching Kohli’s struggle with the red ball evoked anger and frustration in me. It seemed as though, like every other record of Sachin's, he was after this one as well: How much more could he test a fan’s patience?
Whenever I talked with my cricket-enthusiast friends about Kohli during last 2 years, I started pushing the idea that Kohli should retire from Test cricket. And now that he has retired, it feels strange. I feel like a kid who threw a tantrum for a toy and now feels miserable after getting it. In reality, I wanted his Test cricket career to have a happy ending. But I think it was not that bad either. The stars did align in the last moments of his Test cricket. He was leading in Bumrah’s place on the last day of the Test match, again with an inexperienced line up against an almost improbable ask. To win while defending 150-odd runs.
His last act in Test cricket was that of a leader. He was the leader the team could look up to when the odds were against them. The same leader who wrecked Hell for 60 overs on England. The same leader who accepted a valiant defeat while chasing 350+ in his very first match as captain, instead of settling for a draw.
I hate comparisons. Comparing him to Sachin was unfair, according to Kohli himself. As a fan, Sachin’s mastery left me awestruck, whereas Kohli’s struggles were inspirational. Nobody expected Kohli to do so much. Why go on a vegan diet, why hit the gym daily, and why practice for hours even when nothing is working for you and memes are being made about your practice sessions? I guess it is also the part that comes when you pursue something you love so much. You keep on giving your best despite not getting anything to show.
Kohli the Test cricketer was never supposed to be a fairy tale story. It was meant for much bigger life lessons. It taught me that however hard someone may try, some things remain out of reach, always. But it doesn’t mean one should not try. If I could take one thing from this story into my life, that would be to try endlessly. Trying itself is a complete act if done with honesty. Kohli’s game had many flaws, but dishonesty towards the game was never one of them.
Writing lesson of the week : I did not apply any writing lesson to this piece. So, no lesson this week.