Let me start this story with a personal anecdote from the Ahmedabad Test, where Virat Kohli scored a fantastic Test hundred after a gap of 1,205 days, or three years and three months.
Just before the first pre-match practice session, Kohli was walking alone bat in hand towards the nets. All of a sudden, Kohli changed direction and walked towards your correspondent, just to say hello and exchange pleasantries, taking me by surprise. I just managed to blurt out a few words and he walked off for practice.
I have known Kohli for a while, having covered many international and domestic matches featuring him, but this had never happened to me before. To be fair, Kohli has always been nice and polite in all my interactions with him, but to see him going a little out of his way and reaching out was wonderful indeed. This was more like Tendulkar or Dhoni or even Rohit Sharma, and not something usually associated with Kohli.
In fact, over the last one year during my international tours to England, Australia, and the UAE, I have been witnessing the metamorphosis of Kohli off the field. I vividly remember him walking almost 50 metres in Brisbane after a practice session just to say thanks as one had stood up for Arshdeep Singh in Dubai when a fan was trying to cross the line.
Of late, the way he speaks with his teammates, the way he meets his fans, the way he reconnects with his old acquaintances and familiar faces, one gets the sense that Kohli at 34 has now started to conduct himself like Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni had throughout their career.
The Kohli of 2012 just screamed and screamed in joy after scoring his first Test hundred in Australia. In 2023, after his 28th Test ton, he just raised his bat towards his teammates in the dressing room with a thankful smile. To put the ton in perspective, Kohli had waited 23 Tests and 41 innings for it.
Doubtless, Kohli 2.0 is a much more charming character. Gone are the days when he would pick fights with rogue fans and even journalists . His use of colourful adjectives has also faded over the years. Has Virat Kohli, or Super V as TV commentators call him, mellowed? Possibly yes, if you have noticed the calm in his conversations.
“I have been playing IPL for 15 years and haven’t won it yet. But that doesn’t stop me from being excited every year. That’s all I can do. That’s the effort I can put in. Every game, every tournament that I play. If we win, great. If we don’t, I am not going to go to my grave thinking if only I had won the IPL I would have died happy. It doesn’t work like that," Kohli said to the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) women’s team after they had lost the opening five matches of the inaugural season of the Women’s Premier League (WPL).
The way Kohli spoke about his vulnerabilities despite his image as an infallible King was refreshing, and at the same time not too surprising.
From the time Kohli won the Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia in 2008, until he quit India’s Test captaincy in 2022, if there was one constant feature of Kohli it was his devil-may-care attitude, his brashness, his West Delhi machismo, and deep, emotional bonds.
During the Asia Cup when he scored his maiden hundred in a T20I against Afghanistan, this writer had asked who had stood by him during his tough phase. "When I resigned from Test captaincy only one person texted me — MS Dhoni. Many people have my number and a lot of them have given suggestions on TV, but no one reached out to me. Connection and respect for someone, if genuine, shows in these kinds of situations," Kohli had said in Dubai last year.
That King Kohli, an icon himself, is an unabashed Dhoni admirer is well known. Yet Kohli can hardly be compared with the former India captain as far public demeanour goes. However, that seems to be changing. Cricket fans the world over will love the metamorphosis of Kohli, just as they have always loved him.
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