OPINIONShock waves started to ripple through the cricketing firmament a little after 6.45 pm IST on Saturday, within seconds of Virat Kohli taking to social media to announce his resignation from the Indian Test captaincy with immediate effect. It was a decision of seismic proportions, as left field and out of the blue as Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s retirement from Test cricket, midway through the Test series in Australia, in December 2014.
The immediate provocation, it must be assumed, was the 1-2 defeat in South Africa, formalised by a seven-wicket loss in the deciding Test in Cape Town on Friday. A little over 24 hours after that denouement came Kohli’s honest and heartfelt statement reaffirming the esteem with which he held the Indian captaincy.
In the space of five months, Kohli has gone from the undisputed leader across formats to the king who abdicated two of the three thrones he occupied. One suspects the loss of the other throne, snatched away by the decision-makers with no little justification, had some role to play in Saturday’s developments.
In the immediacy of the preferred social media route to resignation, there was stunned disbelief in Indian cricket circles. Few, if any, had seen this coming, one day after a Test series loss and just four days before the start of the first of three One-Day Internationals in South Africa. Even recent head coach Ravi Shastri, one of two people Kohli has thanked by name in his outgoing message, was caught unawares when he was informed by a member of his coaching staff that Kohli had pulled the plug on his captaincy career.
In the middle of September last year, a month before the start of the T20 World Cup, Kohli had made it clear that he would be stepping down as the T20I boss at the end of the competition. In December, Chetan Sharma’s selection panel saw little merit in having two different leaders in the two white-ball formats, conferring the 50-over captaincy too on Rohit Sharma. It’s impossible that Kohli hadn’t considered that possibility when he quit the T20 leadership role.
However, he would have expected a little more empathy from the deciding authorities than a throwaway line informing him of his ouster as ODI captain from the chief selector, 90 minutes before the start of the meeting to pick the Test squad for South Africa.
BCCI president Sourav Ganguly’s assertion that he had requested Kohli not to quit as T20 captain, and that both he and Chetan had informed Kohli of the imminent change in the ODI leadership set-up, were contradicted by Kohli in his pre-departure press conference last month, suggesting that somewhere along the way, the lines of communication between the BCCI and the country’s best batsman had got entangled in an unseemly mess.
It wasn’t so much that battle lines had been drawn as an air of uncertainty and skepticism which had come to hang heavy over Indian cricket. Kohli couldn’t have forgotten that slight this quickly; more than slight, though, he perhaps feels the hurt at a distinct lack of empathy and courtesy, both of which any skipper, let alone one as storied as Kohli, deserved.
Be that as it may, history will regard Kohli with far more kindness and greater esteem than the current powers-that-be in the BCCI seem to. And that won’t merely be because he has the highest winning percentage of all non-Australian captains in Test cricket. Or that he is India’s winningest skipper, with 40 triumphs in his 68 games at the helm.
R Sridhar, the fielding coach of the Indian team for seven years until last November, calls Kohli a ‘movement.’ The former Hyderabad left-arm spinner knows what he is talking about, having seen Kohli’s transformation from a chubby lad with a liking for all the good things in life to a single-minded professional who thought little of overhauling his lifestyle to become the best version of himself.
Among Kohli’s more celebrated legacies is the complete and non-negotiable commitment to fitness. That he himself made a conscious move to cut out the flab, pun intended, was bound to percolate down the ranks once his mates realised the value peak fitness adds to their respective games. Kohli’s insatiable hunger for runs, his propensity to stack up the big scores at a ridiculously regular rate and his sustained intensity was enough for those around him to seamlessly buy into his way of thinking – not that they would have a choice eventually, at any rate!
As significantly, the culture of fitness extended beyond the Indian team and spread far and wide across the country, to those working their way up the rungs in domestic cricket, to those at the age-group level trying to make the next step up. No one man has done more to trigger a revolution in the sport in the country than Kohli with his insistence on peak fitness.
Kohli found a kindred spirit in Shastri as the duo set about making plans on how to raise India’s stock as a travelling unit. With tours to South Africa, England and Australia crammed in a 12-month period in 2018, there was a studied slant towards shoring up the pace resources. Towards that end, they found an able enforcer in Bharat Arun, the former India paceman who was Shastri’s trusted lieutenant as the bowling coach of the Indian team.
Brick by colourful brick, Arun pieced together an attack for the ages while ensuring that there was enough back-up to tide over workload management and injury concerns. Kohli’s faith in pace has been vindicated by India’s performances overseas, even if the Final Frontier that South Africa is remains to be conquered.
Among Indian captains, Kohli was a rarity in that he wasn’t afraid of losing. Often, either due to a closed mindset, fearful of ramifications or owing to absence of adequate bowling resources, his predecessors had placed safety above all else. Kohli was an intelligent gambler, willing to risk defeat if he sensed the slightest possibility of victory. It might not have endeared him to some of the legends of Indian cricket, but who is to question his methods, given the results?
Kohli was brazen, in-your-face, aggressive, intense, passionate, driven. He polarised opinion with his conduct but whether you loved him or hated him, you could not ignore him. His bat might have gotten cold in recent times, but this could just be the spur for it to start firing again. India will gladly take Kohli the batsman over Kohli the captain as it plunges into a period of transition.
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