In an ideal world, Virat Kohli would have made his 100th Test appearance in front of a packed, full home at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, his undisputed cricket home his uninterrupted partnership with the franchises representing that city in the Indian Premier League. Connected. , The past two years, more than ever, have vehemently eschewed the ideal of a perfect world, so the former India captain will have to make do with bringing up the milestone in front of the half-empty stands at the PCA Stadium in Mohali. The first Test against Sri Lanka begins on Friday (March 4).
It should come as no surprise to anyone remotely invested in cricket that in the generation after the golden age of Indian batting, Kohli is the first player to hit the 100 Test mark. Right from her junior days, it was clear that she was no ordinary genius. His coach, Raj Kumar Sharma, refers to him as ‘God-given’; However, this is only a quarter of the puzzle. What Kohli has made out of the gift given to him is staggering.
One hundred Test performances alone translate to 500 days of Test cricket, although it is a stretch as to how some of these matches run their full course. It doesn’t come easy or often. In fact, Kohli is only the 12th Indian to enter the club of eight other former captains. As much as anything else, it testifies to an individual’s fitness, appetite, commitment and desire, Kohli has demonstrated a substantial amount since his modest debut in the Caribbean in the summer of 2011.
Even though he scored just 76 runs in five innings in the West Indies, some have questioned whether Kohli is at Test level. By then, he had already made his limited-overs credentials clear with several scintillating performances. By all accounts, he had an outstanding World Cup 2011, including a century in the tournament opener against Bangladesh, but he tended to fly under the radar as all eyes were on Yuvraj Singh, Sachin Tendulkar and Mahendra Singh. Singh was on Dhoni, who had the coveted sixes. The safe cup is now a part of folklore.
Kohli never felt the need to convince himself, others, that he could be as much at home in a five-day game as his 50- and 20-over siblings, where he hit run-chases. Took the art of masterminding. An exceptionally rare level. His lack of runs in the Caribbean was no more than an aberration. It won’t take long for Kohli to start translating his limited-overs exploits into the less forgiving environment of the five-day format.
Fair enough, it was Australia that ushered in the ‘arrival’ of Kohli, the Test behemoth-in-waiting. On an otherwise disastrous tour of Down Under in 2011-12, Kohli made a different start to the series with classy knocks of 44 and 75 on the bouncy WACA strip in the third Test in Perth, then raised his arms in celebration. carried on in the next game at Adelaide when he formalized his first try with three points.
Until India’s next series, six months later at home against New Zealand, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman had bid goodbye to the international game. Tendulkar hoisted the flag for the old guys, but it was time for Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara to shine. Are they?
How will they step into the huge breach created by the sudden loss of 300 Test match experience? How would they react if the young Turks suddenly moved into the anointed strongholds? Of course he had the skills, but did he have the disposition to meet expectations—his own, as much as those of those around him?
Nearly a decade later, these questions have become rhetorical, if not redundant. Along with Ajinkya Rahane, Pujara and Kohli shaped the next major phase of Indian batting, even though returns have fallen to medium-low over the years. And in this trio, Kohli stands at the top with the effervescence of his stroke-play, the magnificence of his consistency, the magnificence of his presence, rising above the others.
So far as he is at the semi-circle after a long barren run that has extended his century-less stint in international cricket to 27 months, Kohli’s biggest flashpoint came after the unfortunate tour of England in 2014, James Anderson made a tremendous comeback of 134 runs in 10 Test innings when he was brutally exposed. This was his reckoning moment. More experienced batsmen had failed to exude confidence and arrogance from such a blow, and Kohli was only three years old in Test cricket. How will Kohli react?
The answer was swift, dramatic, usually Kohli. Feeding on team director Ravi Shastri’s technical expertise and the time he spent with Tendulkar in the nets, Kohli turned to the next series in Australia to ward off England’s demons. In the first Test at Adelaide, where he stood as captain for the first time in Dhoni’s unavailability, Kohli scored centuries in both innings, even as India surrendered the Test. That game was a pivotal moment in Indian cricket history, regardless of its outcome.
For starters, Kohli answered questions revolving around his mental toughness and his technical preparedness in a particularly feisty fashion. More importantly, Dhoni’s successor had spelled out his captaincy mantra – that losing a Test match is acceptable, as long as the intention to win is clear. It wasn’t a philosophy that appealed to everyone, at least for the old-timers, who fought tooth and nail to secure a draw when India were India’s perennial underdogs, but Kohli was not to be disappointed. . He was his own man, as he showed during India’s unsuccessful 347-run target on the final day of that Adelaide Test. He could strike, absorb punches, ride the waves of criticism, until he was convinced that his allies were on the same page.
After starting the series as a replacement captain, Kohli was handed the reins of the Test team for the fourth and final game in Sydney, when Dhoni unexpectedly retired at the conclusion of the third match at the MCG. Characteristically, he celebrated the height with a handsome 147, for the next seven years, Kohli ruled the Test arena with an iron fist, maintaining a dominance at home while raising India’s shares overseas Which has not been challenged since Alistair Cook’s 1-2 surrender. England in early 2012.
While his captaincy was uncompromising and ruthless – match-winning performances in the previous game were counted very rarely if he felt that the player’s resources in question did not match the conditions in the next – his batting took on a frenzied look. Frenzy Dimensions. Reportedly in his toughest phase as captain when he was said to be at loggerheads with head coach Anil Kumble in 2016-17, he scored a double century for fun. Starting with 200 runs against the West Indies at North Sound in August 2016, Kohli scored a scintillating run, leading him to scores of 211 (vs New Zealand, October), 235 (vs England, December) and 204 (vs Bangladesh). met. February 2017), with 167 runs for good measure against England as well. It was the joyous exuberance of runs scored with his immense ability, panache, dominance and accuracy.
Kohli’s investment following Shastri’s return, this time as Kumble’s successor as head coach, is too well documented to tolerate repetition. Once they included Jasprit Bumrah in the Test mix in 2018 and shaped an attack around Gujarat’s unparalleled pace, India were as dangerous overseas as they were unbeatable at home. Successive series wins in Australia testified to India’s rise as a distant tsunami, a development they reinforced with a 2-1 lead when the final Test in England was temporarily called off last September.
However, all good things in life must come to an end, and by the tour of England, the cracks were starting to surface. The second series win in Australia belonged more to Rahane than Kohli – the latter had returned home on paternity leave after a devastation 36 in Adelaide – but what was even more worrying was that his bat was blazing cold. went. The centuries dried up without warning; Kohli’s last international century came in November 2019, scoring an impressive 136 against Bangladesh in the Day-Night Test in Bangladesh. Old technical glitches in England resurfaced, and it was clear that Kohli had hit a roadblock.
Kohli might not have anticipated the pace when he announced his decision to step down from the T20I captaincy at the end of the World Cup last November, while clearly stating his intention to continue as ODI and Test captain. It was not officially going down well, although one cannot question the merits of not splitting the white-ball captaincy. But the way Kohli was dumped as the 50-over captain, with a bitter taste in his mouth, BCCI President Sourav Ganguly and Kohli issued the exact opposite statement on how the rift between the BCCI/selectors and Kohli ahead of Rohit. communication took place. Sharma’s elevation as the undisputed limited overs captain.
Things went awry in South Africa in January when India took a 1-0 lead and went down 1-2, their hopes of securing a maiden series win in the land of the Proteas buried in a heap of sadness and despair. In his two Tests of that series, Kohli seemed to bat from a bad, scratchy, fading memory, though he kept his head down and scored 79 for four and a half hours in the first innings of the final. Test. A day after the series’ surrender, he also resigned from Test captaincy, curtailing a colourful, mostly illustrious, sometimes controversial seven years.
As he enters his 100th Test, Kohli should have enough time for soul-searching and introspection. He is 33 years old, an age often considered as close to the batsman’s pinnacle as possible. But he has already played international cricket for 13 and a half years, so what he does in the next few years depends entirely on how hungry and motivated the person in question is. If he can put the unpleasant events of the past three months behind him, rediscovering his enthusiasm and intensity that could turn out to be horrifyingly intimidating, India may have made a comeback by bringing back the batsman at the expense of skipper Kohli. Would have made an excellent deal. No one will be more pleased than Rohit and Dravid, who were tasked with taking Indian cricket forward.
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