Is it time to move on from Virat Kohli in T20s?

It’s safe to that if Virat Kohli stays in shape and chooses to give it a go, he will be in the frame for 2024. (Photo: Twitter)

It’s been barely a week since India were dumped out in the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup. The entitled Indian cricket fan, for some reason, thought India were favourites to win the tournament. That didn’t pan out, and to make matters worse, the old enemy England ended up winning the title.

It’s been instructive to see fans and the media gradually go through the five stages of grief. First there was denial - “How could our IPL gods play so badly?” Then, inevitably, came anger, bargaining and depression, rolled into one continuum of disgruntlement - “Off with their heads! Bench these anchors! Sack the captain and coach! All of them are spoilt by easy IPL money! We will never win!” And then, since the wheels of Indian cricket move so fast, we have largely already moved into acceptance - the IPL transfer news has already started making headlines, a full six months before the tournament even begins. In due course, India’s amateurish World Cup campaign will be forgotten, as obscure bilateral series will show up to fill in the void.

One question, however, won’t go away too easily. Critics have begun to grind their axes, pundits have started publishing long-winded stat tables, and everyone has an opinion on the matter. The question: Is Virat Kohli done as a T20 player for India?

At times like this, the biggest star in the team ends up becoming a lightning rod for the collective rage. It happened to Sachin Tendulkar after India’s exit from the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies, and it’s happening with Kohli now.

The arguments against Kohli are several, so let’s examine them one at a time.

Argument 1: Kohli bats too slowly for too long, putting undue pressure on his partners to make up the slack.

Kohli does start slowly, there’s no denying it. In the semi-final against England, he launched his sixth ball, off Chris Woakes, for an incredible six over the covers. But that was an exception, and his 50 on that day only featured four more boundary hits. Even his half-century against the Netherlands was a sedate affair until the very end. In his famous match-winning effort against Pakistan, too, he exploded at the very end when he and India had no other go.

Kohli’s boundary-abstinence is, however, not down to lack of ability. India’s XI at the World Cup featured a long tail at the bottom, and a shorter tail at the top, which we will get to in a moment. This meant their batters had to bat a certain way. Kohli responded by putting a price on his wicket, and trusted himself to take down bowlers in the slog overs. India needed other batters in the middle order to take their chances, even as Kohli stepped into gear for the slog-overs dash against fast bowlers.

Did Kohli’s careful batting result in wickets falling at the other end? Not really - if anything, batting in the assured company of Kohli seemed to bring the brilliant best out of Suryakumar Yadav and Hardik Pandya.

Argument 2: India has too many anchors at the top, and they do not need Kohli to play the same way.

The term anchor in cricket refers to a batter who occupies the crease with risk-free cricket, and prefers survival over scoring fast. This term, if anything, flatters Rohit Sharma and K.L. Rahul, India’s anchors at the top alongside Kohli. Rahul’s record consists of mountains of runs he scores against weaker opponents - he had 50s against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe in this World Cup, as well as against Scotland, Namibia and Afghanistan in the previous World Cup.

He, however, tends to go AWOL against bigger teams, pottering around for too long before falling cheaply anyway. Rohit has been below par at the IPL for years now, and his failures have been overshadowed by the success of the Mumbai Indians team. Both Rahul and Rohit have been excellent for India in other formats, especially Test cricket. As I had detailed in an earlier piece, for reasons ranging from lack of depth, to a systemic obsessive hero-worship of batters, India’s Test cricketers keep finding space in the T20 team.

The reason behind India’s anchor problem isn’t Kohli. It is Rohit and Rahul. In an ideal world, Kohli bats at No. 3 after Prithvi Shaw and Rishabh Pant have given India a smashing start at the top.

Argument 3: The era of anchors is over, and so Kohli too should be shown the door.

England’s designated anchor Dawid Malan missed the semis and the final with injury. Steve Smith could barely get a game for Australia, while Babar Azam, Mohammad Rizwan, Kane Williamson and several other anchor prototypes struggled through the tournament.

In an ideal world, anchors would not feature in any T20 side. Yet, except England, no side entertained the idea of playing without an anchor. England could do it because their squad had hitting depth that allowed them to. Every other side had constraints, and anchors played in order to shield the tail.

T20 pundits claim that there is no room for such batting in T20s. True, if your batting line-up consists of AB de Villiers clones batting from 1 to 8. Not true for most real-world sides that don’t have such riches. And especially not true of India’s 2022 World Cup side.

Argument 4: Kohli has a genuine issue against spinners, and it’s easy for them to tie him down.

It is true that Kohli gets stuck against quality spin. But that’s the nature of T20 match-ups: every batter has a weakness against some type of bowler. Teams generally combat this with batting pairs that are complementary in nature. When Adil Rashid and Liam Livingstone were spinning webs around Kohli in the semi-final, he would have liked to have Hardik or Rishabh Pant batting at the other end. However, Kohli’s company during that phase of the game was not Hardik or Pant - it was Rohit, whose recent T20 record against legspin is even worse than Kohli’s.

Exposing Kohli to so many overs of spin without a proper pairing at the other end was a tactical blunder. The blame for it falls on the shoulders of the captain and the coach.

Argument 5: Enough of same-old same-old! Kohli should make way for fresh legs.

Kohli isn’t getting any younger, and it could be time for younger, fitter players… Wait, did we just say fitter players? Are there fitter players than Kohli in Indian cricket, nay in world cricket? No. The fitness argument doesn’t hold water when it comes to Kohli.

However, it is also true that the next T20 World Cup is two years away, and perhaps it is time to groom players who will be in their prime in 2024. Kohli is now scarred by too many unsuccessful T20 World Cups, and it may be better to back fresh names not exposed to so many repeated failures. There is no logically valid response to that argument - but there is an emotional one.

After the 2007 World Cup debacle in West Indies, there was a public outcry against the senior players Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. After that tournament, Ganguly and Dravid faded away from one-dayers, but not Tendulkar. He kept playing the format, had an incredible run of scores for the next four years. And come 2011, he showed up for the World Cup, the sixth of his career, older, wiser, stronger, and wearing all the battle-scars from five failed campaigns.

We all know how that World Cup ended for India and for Tendulkar. On April 2, 2011, he was carried aloft by his young team-mates on a victory lap around the Wankhede Stadium.

One of those young team-mates was Kohli.

Will life come full circle for Kohli in the West Indies, in 2024?

We are getting ahead of ourselves. But it’s safe to that if he stays in shape and chooses to give it a go, he will be in the frame for 2024. And you write off a champion at your own peril.