This series has provided a peek into a not-so-far future without Virat Kohli, and it’s not pretty
Transitions don’t come with a notice, especially when it’s a team sport as layered as cricket. Ticking over two years now, a feeling has grown that the time to prepare for a future without Virat Kohli could arrive any day. Till it did last month in Hyderabad, albeit for only a few matches, but startling every stakeholder in its wake. More so because Kohli was shaping up to hit his gold standard of batting with an average of 55.91 last year.
India’s Virat Kohli during a practice session(PTI)
Considering the unprecedented, extended and alarming dry spell that he had to endure preceding 2023, there couldn’t have been a bigger reaffirmation of India’s blind faith in Kohli. But what it also perhaps did was subconsciously postpone the need to find a rightful heir apparent anyway.
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Cut to when Kohli has made himself unavailable for the entire series, India’s batting is waiting to become a microcosm of this dilemma. The start at Hyderabad, which at 80/1 was calming anyway, carried more promise because KL Rahul was to come. And as long as he was at the crease, India’s batting still had a sense of context and purpose.
At Visakhapatnam though, Shreyas Iyer offered no comfort at all. Now that neither Rahul nor Iyer are available for selection, the question of who will fill the considerable boots of Kohli is becoming even more inevitable, if not downright unsettling.
Which is a bit strange for India have always managed to roughly coincide the departure of one batting legend with the arrival of another. Rahul Dravid to Cheteshwar Pujara, Sachin Tendulkar to Virat Kohli, VVS Laxman to Ajinkya Rahane—the passing of baton was pretty seamless to account for roughly three decades of middle-order pre-eminence.
But now suddenly there are two voids and a half, the latter destined to worsen into a headache because like it or not, Kohli will retire one day. And this series has managed to offer a disconcerting peek into that future. With three Tests still to go, the exact degree to which Kohli’s absence might hurt India is yet to be ascertained. But some numbers are already revealing. In the two Tests so far, India averaged 41 for the No 4 position. With Kohli, at home, it was 63.34 since 2015.
It still doesn’t reveal much so here’s more. Eight hundreds and three fifties coming at No 4 in 27 Test wins at home works out to at least a fifty every four innings for Kohli in a winning cause. That fourth innings average of 53.33 at home—better than even Tendulkar’s 46.94—speaks highly of the skill required to last on tricky crumbling pitches, something India lacked at Hyderabad.
Most convincing, however, is Kohli’s first innings dominance. If a drawn series opener at Rajkot in 2016 had given a glimmer of hope to England, Kohli was quick to extinguish it with an authoritative 167 in the second Test at Visakhapatnam. Fourth Test of that series, England charted the 400-run peak at Wankhede, only to watch Kohli scale 235 and guide India to 631 in an innings and 36-run win. It’s not coincidental that five out of seven times India has piled up 600 plus in the last 10 years, Kohli has scored at least a hundred to it, four of them double hundreds. India seem to be in desperate need of similar first innings assurance, now more than ever.
Problem is, they seem to be running out of proven options. When Rahul isn’t scoring big runs at the unlikeliest of venues (read Centurion, that too twice in two Tests) he is at the NCA nursing either a niggle or a strain. Iyer still doesn’t have a commendable body of work and now it seems he neither has the fitness to stay in the race. Rishabh Pant could have been a temporary but extremely viable substitute but no one can still put a finger on an exact date of return. Which leaves only Shubman Gill as a long-term option even though there is still no consensus on whether he should open, stick to coming at one down or stake a claim as the future No 4.
Even if he is, Gill hasn’t even come close to match the numbers Kohli started producing a year into his career. If a steady high 40s average through 2012 to 2015 laid down the foundation of a great career in the making, Kohli had raised the bar 2016 onwards, raking in 1000 plus runs three years in a row at an average of 66.59. What helped anchor this was a spectacular average of 81.84 at home in the same phase, bulk of which came against dilapidated bowling attacks but still had to be scored from scratch.
There is no doubt Kohli has long been the main man to have raised the ceiling of India’s dominance, particularly at home. He knows how to grind out difficult phases and is particularly effective with his risk-free but rewarding brand of batting. It was almost a given that if India bat big, Kohli is invariably at the heart of it. To lose that edge in such a vital series has been nothing short of sobering.
