In an ideal world, Virat Kohli would have made his 100th Test appearance in front of a packed, adoring full house at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, his unquestioned cricketing home given his uninterrupted association with the franchise representing that city in the Indian Premier League. The last two years, more than ever before, have emphatically dispelled the norm of an ideal world, so the former India captain will have to make do with bringing up the milestone moment in front of half-empty stands at the PCA Stadium in Mohali when the first Test against Sri Lanka begins on Friday (March 4).
It hasn’t come as a surprise to anyone even remotely invested in cricket that, of the generation succeeding the golden era of Indian batsmanship, Kohli is the first to the 100-Test mark. Right from his junior days, it was apparent that he was no ordinary talent. His coach, Raj Kumar Sharma, refers to him as ‘God-gifted’; that’s only a quarter of the jigsaw, though. It’s what Kohli has made of the gift bestowed on him that has been staggering.
A hundred Test appearances translates to 500 days of Test cricket alone, though that is a stretch given how few of these matches run their full course. It doesn’t come easy or often. Indeed, Kohli is only the 12th Indian to make his entry into a club that contains eight other former captains. As much as anything else, it testifies to an individual’s fitness, hunger, commitment and desire, facets Kohli has showcased in ample measure since a modest debut in the Caribbean in the summer of 2011.
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Even though he mustered just 76 runs in five innings in the West Indies, few questioned if Kohli belonged at the Test level. By then, he had already illustrated his limited-overs credentials with several spectacular performances. By all accounts, he had an excellent World Cup in 2011, including a hundred 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 Dhoni, whose iconic six to secure the cup is now a part of folklore.
Kohli never felt the need to convince himself, much less others, that he could be as much at home in the five-day game as in its 50- and 20-over siblings, where he had taken the art of masterminding run-chases to an extraordinarily rarified level. His lack of runs in the Caribbean were no more than an aberration. It wouldn’t be long before Kohli started to translate his limited-overs exploits to the less forgiving environs of the five-day format.
Fittingly enough, it was Australia that heralded the ‘arrival’, if you like, of Kohli, the Test behemoth-in-waiting. On an otherwise disastrous tour Down Under in 2011-12, Kohli shrugged off a diffident 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 aloft in expletive-laden celebration in the next game in Adelaide when he formalised his first tryst with three figures.
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By India’s next series, at home against New Zealand six months later, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman had bid adieu to the international game. Tendulkar kept the flag flying for the older lot, but this was the time for the likes of Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara to shine. Would they?
How would they step into the giant breach created by the sudden loss of the experience of 300 Test appearances? How would they respond to suddenly going from young turks to anointed bulwarks? They had the skills, of course, but did they possess the temperament to meet the expectations – their own, as much as that of those around them?
Nearly a decade on, these questions have become rhetorical, if not redundant. Alongside Ajinkya Rahane, Pujara and Kohli shaped the next heady phase of Indian batting, even if the returns have dipped to middling-low in the last couple of years. And of this troika, Kohli has stood the tallest, towering above the others with the incandescence of his stroke-play, the magnificence of his consistency, the imperiousness of his presence.
Until now when he is at a semi-crossroads following a prolonged barren run that has extended his century-less stint in international cricket to 27 months, Kohli’s biggest flashpoint came after the ill-fated England tour in 2014, when he was brutally exposed by James Anderson on his way to underwhelming returns of 134 runs in 10 Test innings. It was his moment of reckoning. Far more experienced batsmen had failed to recover from such blows to confidence and ego, and Kohli was only three years young in Test cricket. How would Kohli react?
The answer was swift, dramatic, typically Kohli. Feeding off the technical expertise of team director Ravi Shastri and time spent with Tendulkar in the nets, Kohli approached the next series, in Australia, determined to exorcise the demons of England. In the first Test in Adelaide, where he stood in as captain for the first time in Dhoni’s unavailability, Kohli breezed to hundreds in both innings even though India ended up surrendering the Test. That game was a seminal moment in Indian cricket history, never mind its outcome.
For starters, Kohli had answered questions revolving around his mental toughness and his technical preparedness in characteristically feisty fashion. More importantly, Dhoni’s heir apparent had bared his captaincy mantra – that it was acceptable to lose a Test match so long as the intent to win was apparent. It wasn’t a philosophy that appealed to everyone, not least to the old-timers who had fought tooth and nail to secure draws when India were the perennial underdogs, but Kohli wasn’t to be deterred. He was his own man, as he showed during India’s abortive chase of 347 on the final day of that Adelaide Test. He could take the blows, absorb the punches, ride the surging waves of criticism so long as he was convinced that his colleagues were on the same page as him.
Having begun the series as a replacement captain, Kohli was handed over the reins of the Test side for the fourth and final game in Sydney when Dhoni retired, unexpectedly, at the conclusion of the third match at the MCG. Characteristically, he celebrated the elevation with a lovely 147, For the next seven years, Kohli ruled the Test arena with an iron fist, upping India’s stocks overseas while maintaining a dominance at home that has been unchallenged since the 1-2 surrender to Alastair Cook’s England in early 2012.
While his captaincy was uncompromising and ruthless – a match-winning performance in the previous game counted for little if he felt that the resources of the player in question didn’t necessarily match up to the conditions in the next match – his batting assumed a frenetically frenzied dimension. In allegedly his most arduous phase as captain when he was said to be at loggerheads with head coach Anil Kumble in 2016-17, he stacked up double-hundreds for fun. Starting with an even 200 against West Indies in North Sound in August 2016, Kohli embarked on a jaw-dropping run that fetched him scores of 211 (vs New Zealand, October), 235 (vs England, December) and 204 (vs Bangladesh, February 2017), with a 167 thrown in for good measure, also against England. It was a joyous outpouring of his immense ability, the runs made with panache, dominance and correctness.
Kohli’s investment in pace once Shastri returned, this time as Kumble’s successor as head coach, is too well documented to bear repetition. Once he drafted Jasprit Bumrah into the Test mix in 2018 and shaped an attack around the unique Gujarat quick, India were as dangerous overseas as they were unbeatable at home. Successive series wins in Australia testified to India’s growth as an away tsunami, a development reinforced by the 2-1 lead they held when the final Test in England was temporarily called off last September.
All good things in life, though, must come to an end, and by the England tour, the cracks had begun to surface. The second series triumph in Australia was more Rahane’s than Kohli’s – the latter had returned home on paternity leave after the 36 all out catastrophe in Adelaide – but more worryingly, the blazing rapier that was his bat had gone cold. The centuries dried up without warning; Kohli’s last international ton came in November 2019, a wonderful 136 against Bangladesh in the day-night Test in Bangladesh. Throw in the resurfacing of old technical failings in England, and it was clear that Kohli had hit a roadblock.
Kohli might not have anticipated the rapidity with which events devolved when he announced his decision to quit the T20I captaincy at the end of the World Cup last November, while explicitly stating his intent to continue as the ODI and Test skipper. It didn’t seem to go down well with officialdom, though one can’t question the merit of not splitting the white-ball captaincy. But the manner in which Kohli was dumped as 50-over captain left a bitter taste in the mouth, with BCCI president Sourav Ganguly and Kohli issuing diametrically opposite statements on what kind of communication had taken place between the BCCI/selectors and Kohli ahead of Rohit Sharma’s elevation as the undisputed limited-overs captain.
Things came to a head in South Africa in January when India blew a 1-0 lead and went down 1-2, their hopes of conjuring a maiden series win in the land of the Protea buried in a heap of misery and disappointment. In his two Tests that series, Kohli seemed to be batting from poor, scratchy, fading memory, though he did put his head down and grind out an atypically circumspect four-and-a-half-hour 79 in the first innings of the final Test. A day after the series was surrendered, he stepped down from the Test captaincy as well, bringing the curtain down on a colourful, mostly glorious, occasionally contentious seven years.
As he heads into his 100th Test, Kohli must have had enough time to soul-search and introspect. He is but 33, an age often considered as close to a batsman’s peak as possible. But he has already played international cricket for 13 and a half years, so what he makes of the next few years depends entirely on how hungry and motivated the man in question is. If he can put the unsavoury events of the last three months behind him, rediscover his zeal and intensity which can be frighteningly intimidating, India will have struck an excellent bargain by getting back Kohli the batsman at the expense of Kohli the captain. No one will take greater delight in that than Rohit and Dravid, the men tasked with continuing to drive Indian cricket forward.
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