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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The art of being Virat Kohli
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The art of being Virat Kohli

Is there a batsman who combines beauty, technique, aggression and grit better than him?

Virat Kohli. Photo: Parwaz Khan/ Hindustan TimesPremium
Virat Kohli. Photo: Parwaz Khan/ Hindustan Times

No one talks of the beauty of Virat Kohli’s batting. Pre-ball routine: upright at the crease, a couple of quick twirls of the bat, like a chef deftly honing his knife, and he’s ready. It is economical, assured. It has intent written all over it. It is so much like his batting: no movement wasted, compact as can be, straight, always straight, and so precise it looks like he is not hitting the ball as much as guiding it along its rightful trajectory.

There are no exaggerated swings, no follow-up flourishes. The movement begins, the movement ends. The ball ends up at the boundary. The beauty lies in the fraction of a second in-between; in that lightning moment when Kohli shapes up, head still, his eyes on the ball, and then plays a textbook shot, tempered only by a barely discernible flourish of the wrist. You can feel the artist’s hand, trace his lines, even if you can’t fully understand the art.

Is surgical precision beautiful?

Former New Zealand captain Martin Crowe sees it. Writing about Kohli on the website Espncricinfo, Crowe says: “He exudes the intensity of Rahul (Dravid), the audacity of Virender (Sehwag), and the extraordinary range of Sachin (Tendulkar). That doesn’t make him better, simply sui generis, his own unique kind."

No one talks of the beauty of Kohli’s batting. Kohli would probably like to keep it that way. He scores so many runs, and so often, that it overwhelms perception. Inevitably, keeping in line with cricket’s fascination with numbers, it’s the statistics that dazzle. His mountain of runs, his improbable string of centuries, his ability—unsurpassed among contemporary players from anywhere—to deliver under pressure.

Some numbers then: Kohli has 14 centuries and 21 half-centuries in the 80 innings he has played chasing a total in One Day Internationals (ODIs). Only Sachin Tendulkar has scored more centuries while under the pressure of a frenetic ODI chase—17, but from 232 innings. West Indies opener Chris Gayle, the king of nonchalance, is merely third, with 11 centuries from 132 chases. Kohli thrives against the odds—he averages 64.26 at a strike rate of 92.84 while chasing (far better than his overall average of 51.86); and 52 of those innings resulted in wins.

Kohli would rather you spoke about this than beauty: He makes India win. Thirteen of those 14 centuries were for a winning cause (including his highest ODI score, 183, against Pakistan in 2012). These are incredible numbers, scary and blinding. Here’s the thing of beauty that is so easy to miss: In one of those centuries, scored on 30 October 2013 against Australia in Nagpur, Kohli made 115 off 66 balls, at a strike rate of 174. He hit just one six in that entire innings. Everything else was risk-free, slog-free, perfectly timed, perfectly executed classical shots.

Kohli revels in carrying the heavy load of India’s soaring cricket ambitions, as he will do at this World Cup.

“If you look at the Indian batting line-up, they are in a sense heavily reliant on someone like Virat Kohli…," Dravid told Espncricinfo earlier this year when talking about the World Cup. “He will need to bat well. He’ll need to set the tempo for the side."

Kohli would rather you spoke of his abrasive, bad-boy-from-brash-Delhi attitude. He will take nothing lying down. Fear, or backing down, this can be the thin divide between winning and losing. The great cricket teams in the history of the game knew this—West Indies in the 1970s, Australia always: They would rather engender fear than receive it.

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With Delhi teammates, including Ishant Sharma (left). Photographs courtesy Vikas Kohli

“There’s no good reason that I should respect unnecessarily some people when they are not respecting me," Kohli said about Johnson at a press conference, and then revealed just how much he enjoyed the sledging he had faced on the field. “It was going on throughout the day," Kohli said. “They were calling me a spoilt brat, and I said, ‘Maybe that’s the way I am. You guys hate me, and I like that.’ I like playing against Australia because it is very hard for them to stay calm, and I don’t mind an argument on the field, and it really excites me and brings out the best in me. So they don’t seem to be learning the lesson."

A year before that, in Durban, South Africa, after the Indian team was massacred in an ODI by the host country, some in the Proteas team suggested that India were frightened of South Africa’s fast bowlers.

Kohli smirked, ever so slightly, when told at the press conference about this. His reply: “I don’t think anyone in this Indian team is frightened of anything."

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During the U-19 World Cup in Malaysia, which India won under Kohli’s captaincy.

This instinct has been with Kohli from his earliest days as a cricketer.

18 December 2006. A cold and difficult day for the Delhi Ranji team. Five wickets down for just 59 runs, chasing Karnataka’s first innings total of 446. Out walks one of the newest members of the Delhi team—Kohli. The 18-year-old with spiky hair digs down, helps Delhi reach 103 at the end of the day’s play, without another wicket being lost. He is not out on 40. He goes home. At 2 in the morning, his father dies of a heart attack.

The man who had introduced him to cricket, had brought him a form for a new neighbourhood cricket school—the West Delhi Cricket Academy—when he was just 8, and then taken him, on the back of his scooter, every morning to the academy.

“I was just so happy that day he got that form. I loved every minute I spent in the nets when I joined the academy," Kohli remembers.

As morning dawned, Kohli was faced with an awful choice: stay with the family at the moment of its worst crisis, or go and finish his innings for Delhi. He chose to go in and bat. His family, his coach, they all told him it was the right thing to do. But it didn’t matter, Kohli already knew it was the right thing to do.

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As a young boy, biting off more than he can chew.

Kohli scored 90 runs before getting out at around noon. Delhi drew the match. At 3.30pm, Kohli attended his father’s final rites.

“That was a very personal decision by him and even I wouldn’t have done that myself," says Vikas, Kohli’s elder brother. “I can’t describe that incident in words but our family thought that it was such a difficult thing to suppress that kind of emotional trauma at such a young age."

“We both had the same dream," Kohli says about his father. “He wanted me to play for India. It was my goal to play for the country but yes, after that incident, I got more determined. Every time I do well on the field, I can sense his happiness for me."

Kohli wishes, more than anything else, that his father had been there to see him win the World Cup in 2011; had seen him lift Sachin Tendulkar, the man whose batting had consumed Kohli’s waking hours, on his shoulders for the victory lap. Kohli had grown up trying to copy Tendulkar’s batting.

Crowe, in that article on Espncricinfo, talks of Kohli’s similarities with Tendulkar: “Not unsurprisingly, Kohli will have learnt mostly from Sachin, and even if it isn’t so obvious, it’s slowly becoming clearer. His stance is more closed than Sachin’s, resulting in the leg-side stroke played around the pad, yet it is straightening year by year. By the time he reaches full throttle in a couple of years he will be perfectly aligned, as the master was. His last-second tap of the bat as the bowler gathers is such a classic and vital element from the Sachin book. This last tap sends a spark of electricity through his body and his eyes, then feet, then through his flowing vortex sword, all coming alive as one."

What follows is sheer beauty.

Vimal Kumar is the author of Sachin: Cricketer Of The Century and The Cricket Fanatic’s Essential Guide.

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Published: 30 Jan 2015, 04:10 PM IST
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