Let no one tell you otherwise, Virat Kohli steps back with his head held high
January winter can be quite harsh and demanding depending on which part of the country you’re in. However, no amount of insulation could’ve prepared Indian cricket for the sudden spell of chill it had to face on a rather seemingly usual Saturday. What should’ve been a day of quiet retrospection of the oh-so-near attempt at creating history in South Africa ended up becoming a full-blown pandemonium of paranoid frenzy.
Virat Kohli, the leader in whose image India’s scintillating and entertaining Test team had been built carefully over the last few years had now chosen to walk away from it. “It’s been 7 years of hard work, toil and relentless perseverance everyday to take the team in the right direction. I’ve done the job with absolute honesty and left nothing out there. Every thing has to come to a halt at some stage and for me as Test Captain of India, it’s now,” wrote Kohli on his social media.
While almost everything surrounding the sport’s greatest modern-day superstar has a touch of extremism to it, the timing of his announcement or rather, the complete lack of it made for a series of interesting tales from fans looking to fill the hole of non-information. The lone warrior up against the system that deserted it. The champion who had had his fill. A strong facet of leadership involves recognizing the time for a change of guard.
Even though each and every one of those narratives seem to be quite convincing on the surface, at least until further developments, the truth behind the decision will continue to elude us. For the matter at hand, however, it seems appropriate to celebrate the legacy that Virat Kohli has left behind in all-white.
Indian cricket has been around for quite a while now. Test cricket, for the majority of its existence tied with cricket in India, had been viewed as the pleasure of the purists. Crowning achievements on home soil have always been associated with bragging rights and popular discussions while victories away from home, few and far in between, have been treated as akin to national treasures. The pages in between comprising of defeat, humiliation, and the learning curve were left to the imagination.
When Virat Kohli set out as captain of the Indian Test team in 2014, the format had rather been an afterthought. The glorious era of MS Dhoni’s leadership saw the team lifting a plethora of ICC trophies and finally, India seemed to have been realizing its potential in world cricket. Test cricket? Well, Test cricket could wait.
As the stars would have it, Test cricket found its biggest ambassador in a brash and young Virat Kohli whose spectacular rise coincided with the shift towards the digital age. What cricket administrators once thought of as a dying artform, unable to keep up with the shorter attention spans of an ever-increasing hustle and bustle generation preferring T20s, slowly but steadily ended up becoming a spectacle and receiving the wider national attention that it truly deserves under his leadership.
Sure, crediting Virat Kohli alone for that tectonic shift is a lazy and redundant narrative. Scores of people have worked towards that dream of taking India to the top of cricket’s purest format and plenty has gone on behind the scenes. However, it will also be quite difficult to take all of those variables into account and expect the exact same results without a certain Virat Kohli in it as the reference point.
From trying to grind out an unthinkable win in Adelaide in 2014 despite the immense total set by the opposition in his first game in charge as a stand-in, the groundwork had been laid. Settling for ‘draws’ was never going to be an option under Kohli as captain. As long as the 11 men wearing the Indian badge were out on the pitch for the duration of five days, at no point could they allow themselves into thinking that anything other than a win is a likely outcome.
Players could no longer take fitness for granted either. Cricket is a professional sport and it must be played with that same approach. Strict diets and rigorous training regimes were now commonplace in the Indian dressing room and no player was exempt from it. Those were the central tenets in his philosophy as captain and seven years later, they have helped him in accomplishing his goals.
The 2018 tour of South Africa is now widely recognized as the defining series where Virat Kohli’s India truly discovered the template that became the cornerstone for subsequent greatness. India might’ve lost the series 2-1 but the win in the Johannesburg Test emboldened the side and helped it discover true zeal.
And thus began the bowling revolution led by the rise of Jasprit Bumrah and overseen by Virat Kohli, Bharat Arun, and Ravi Shastri. India quickly became a well-polished fast-bowling side and then became a lethal one. Once-in-a-generation player Jasprit Bumrah was at the center of everything, Mohammad Shami had finally realized his potential, Ishant Sharma’s career saw a massive turnaround, Umesh Yadav provided the brunt of the workforce, and Mohammed Siraj’s route to the senior national side was smoothened.
Although Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja were already experienced campaigners under MS Dhoni’s tenure, they hit the peak of their powers under Kohli’s leadership. The 33-year-old never shied away from doffing his hat to his bowlers, both literally and metaphorically, and under him, Team India hunted intensely for blood like a pack of wolves. This made for a uniquely rich sporting experience that attracted plenty of eyeballs.
Virat Kohli asked the Indian Players for a ‘small favour’ before stepping down as captain
During his leadership, India took all 20 wickets away from home on 22 occasions out of a possible 35. Kohli’s feared bowlers picked up a wicket every 52 deliveries and had a strike rate of just below 60. Ricky Ponting, who captained what is regarded as one of the greatest sides to play the sport, had his bowlers averaging 29.9 and fetched a dismissal every 58 deliveries.
The results and numbers quite often speak for themselves. Until 2017, no Asian team had managed to win a Test series in Australia. By 2021, India had two series victories Down Under (even though Kohli was absent for the majority of the second series, it was still his team). India went to England last year and even though a COVID breakout ensured that the fate of the series will be decided this summer, the visitors have their tails up with a 1-2 lead after outclassing England on several occasions.
40 wins (24 at home) in 68 Tests see Kohli topping the charts as an Indian Test captain. In fact, only Graeme Smith (53 in 109), Ricky Ponting (48 in 77), and Steve Waugh (41 in 57) have more Test wins under their belt than Virat Kohli. His win-loss ratio of 2.352 also makes him the most successful Indian captain ever. Under Kohli’s captaincy, the team has never lost or drawn a home Test series, something that had never been seen before.
There’s an ever-increasing need for placing data and statistics towards chiseling out perfection across all sports with the advent of time. While cold numbers paint a far clearer and more objective picture of reality, sport can rarely be limited to it. At the end of the day, it is a human endeavour and like most things, emotions have a major hand to play, often far more than we realize.
Virat Kohli’s aggressive chest-thumping fanatic obsession while leading in Test cricket galvanised an entire team into achieving dreams that were previously thought of as too good to be true and 1.3 billion Indians became a witness to that modern-day folklore.
While he is set to continue with the same intensity and passion because that is what defines him as a cricketer and person, the road ahead looks bleak because unlike white-ball cricket, from which he was so unceremoniously removed as captain (ODIs), India doesn’t exactly have a clear successor in sight.
India will still start as favourites against any opposition and in any situation, anywhere because that is the true legacy of what Virat Kohli is leaving behind as a leader behind but the onus is on repeating those standards of excellence with a new face holding the reins.