The Indian team was trooping out of the ICC Academy ground after a long, draining practice session under an unforgiving sun on Thursday evening when the Pakistanis walked in for their stint. Virat Kohli was trailing his teammates when a familiar figure caught his eye. The former Indian captain immediately changed direction, heading towards Shaheen Shah Afridi, the Pakistani paceman who was on crutches, recovering as he is from an ACL injury.
Kohli and Afridi exchanged a warm handshake and engaged in a brief conversation surrounding the nature of the latter’s injury and the progress he was making in his rehabilitation process. Afridi wished Kohli well for the Asia Cup, and you could sense the genuine respect and affection that an established champion and a champion-in-the-making had for each other.
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There was little evidence of the turmoil one would have expected of a batsman who lorded the cricketing world for five long years between 2014 and 2019, but who has since fallen on hard times. It isn’t just the fact that he hasn’t made an international hundred for nearly 33 months; that can happen and, in any case, a three-figure knock, however, cherished and celebrated, is but a milestone. It isn’t on three figures alone that a batsman’s worth is measured, so the absence of such an achievement by itself is no great downer.
It’s the other trappings that have been a cause for concern for Kohli’s vast legion of fans running into the millions, and for those immediately and intricately involved with Indian cricket. The authoritative Kohli of the past has been AWOL for a while now. His mastery of attacks, the effortlessness with which he took apart the best in the business and the aura that accompanied him to the batting crease have all dwindled significantly, especially in the period since he stepped down from the T20I captaincy last November after, but not because of, India’s disastrous campaign in the World Cup in the UAE.
Kohli has often looked a little listless and out of sorts, facets that have seldom been associated with him at any stage of an international career now into its 15th year. As happens when there is an inexplicable and dramatic turnaround in fortunes, he found different ways of getting out, though there was also a touch of the sameness to his vulnerability outside the off-stump against deliveries he would have been better off not flirting with. Sometimes, he smiled in resignation; at others, he berated himself. Kohli carried the look of a man who felt some influential intangible entity was having a little fun at his expense, that the cricketing gods had suddenly and for no reason turned their backs on him.
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This was uncharted territory for the man wonder. For years on end, he had gotten accustomed – as his fans had too – to unquestioned dominance. In some ways, this lean trot has magnified Kohli’s wondrous run during that five-year golden period when hundreds were taken for granted when it was assumed that if he was in the middle, the opposition could bid the game goodbye. It reiterated just what a force of nature Kohli had been in all parts of the world against all opposition in all formats, striding the scene like a colossus and intimidating all-comers with his presence, with the luminescence of his stroke-making, with the grandiose edifices erected so effortlessly and with such metronomic efficiency.
For those used to overwhelming success, a slight setback is no deterrent. Indeed, if anything, it pushes them to compete with themselves, to convince themselves that a failure is no more than the first step towards the next success. Kohli was no exception; he left no stone unturned in his sustained pursuit of excellence. He put limb and body on the line every time he donned the India shirt, be it the flannelled white or the multifarious hues of blue in limited-overs games. He committed himself whole-heartedly to extreme physical exertion in his bid to remain the fastest, fittest member of the team. He faced balls by the hundreds in the nets and in the anonymity of indoor sessions. Yet, the tide wouldn’t turn.
The tough exterior veneer offered no window to what was going on in his mind. Kohli was sacked as the ODI captain in December and gave up the Test captaincy in January, after a disappointing series loss in South Africa despite opening up a 1-0 in the three-match showdown. That didn’t trigger a drastic turnaround in his personal fortunes, nor did ceding the skipper’s role at Royal Challengers Bangalore, for whom too he had an underwhelming Season 15 of the Indian Premier League.
It was during the IPL that Ravi Shastri, who knows Kohli better than most, suggested that Kohli took time away from the game to refresh, recharge and refocus. The former head coach has always had Kohli’s back and the latter clearly respects and values his views and opinions. It’s unlikely that Shastri’s words didn’t influence Kohli’s decision to sit out the tour of the West Indies and the US that entailed three ODIs and five T20Is.
One would have thought Kohli would have used that six-week period after the ODIs in England to work on the technical aspects of his batting. But in a startling revelation in an interview to Star Sports aired on Saturday, he revealed that for the first time in a long while, he hadn’t held a bat in 30 days. “This is the first time in ten years that I have not touched the bat in a whole month,” he said. “When I sat down and thought about it, I was like I haven’t actually touched a bat for 30 days, which I haven’t done ever in my life. That’s when I came to the realisation that I was kind of trying to fake my intensity a bit recently. ‘No, I can do it’… being competitive and convincing yourself that you have intensity but your body is telling you to stop. Mind is telling you to just take a break and step back… You can neglect it by saying you are fit, you are working hard on yourself, and you will be fine because you are fit mentally.
“I have been looked at as a guy who is mentally very strong, and I am, but everyone has a limit, and you need to recognise that limit, otherwise things can get unhealthy for you. So this period actually taught me a lot of things that I was not allowing to come to the surface. When they did, I embraced it,” he went on. “There is much more to life than just your profession. And when the environment around you is such that everyone looks at you through your professional identity, somewhere you start losing perspective as a human being.”
Kohli has been nothing if not honest to himself all through his cricketing life, so it should come as no surprise that, in the lowest ebb he has been at since his international debut, he reverted to type. His confession that he had been trying to ‘fake my intensity a bit’ must have taken courage of conviction, but again, that has been a noticeable Kohli trait all these years. That he felt he needed to fake his intensity and that he was starting to lose perspective showcases a human side that has often been lost amidst the mountain of exceptionally crafted runs and the in-the-face aggression that has been such a talking point.
On Sunday when he takes the field against Pakistan in the Asia Cup, he will become just the second cricketer after Ross Taylor to make a hundred international appearances in all three formats. That speaks not just to his longevity but also the workload he has had to shoulder since playing his first game for the country in August 2008.
Kohli’s words, his demeanour and his approach suggest that he is now a man at peace with himself, and in a much better headspace than he was during his last international assignment, in England. If these can translate into a welcome return to run-scoring ways, that will be the icing on the cake. His skipper, Rohit Sharma, says that in nets, he sees a Kohli no different from the one who was smashing attacks to smithereens not so long back. “The way he is batting, what I have seen from close, he looks good, in good touch,” Rohit said on Saturday. “It does not look like he is thinking too much. I’ve not got to see any extraordinary changes (in his batting/technique). He has had a one-month break, that freshness we are able to see.”
Kohli has struck the right chord as he plots a storming return to prolific run-scoring. His sense of occasion would dictate that Sunday should catalyse his second coming, and were that to eventuate, Rohit and head coach Rahul Dravid, who has rejoined the team after recovering from Covid, will go to bed on Sunday night with broad grins on their faces.
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