With undivided focus on bat, Virat can now reinvent his craft

There is something edifying about knowing how a craftsman pursues excellence. A few years ago, Virat Kohli, at the height of his prowess in white-ball cricket, said that he avoided such strokes in the shorter format which might corrupt his technique in the longer and the purest version of the game. Virat’s veneration of test cricket had the austere charm of a devotee’s asceticism. Beneath all the in-your-face aggression, he elevated the longer version almost to the spiritual core of his illustrious run as India’s captain and leading batsman.

If the quaint appeal of test cricket ever needed a romantic advertisement, Virat has been there in immaculate whites. Coming as the last in the sequence of his departures from leadership roles in various formats, his decision to quit India’s test captaincy a day after India’s 2-1 series defeat at Cape Town in South Africa has let loose numerous theories rooted in dressing room and BCCI power play. While speculating about the actual trigger for the sudden announcement, there are more comforting ways of looking at it. The most soothing, however, would be to see it as Virat’s resolve to regain single-minded focus on his batsmanship after the team he led couldn’t breach the last overseas frontier in South Africa.

As the last two years haven’t seen his sublime batting talent live up to his high standards, the great batter can’t miss the obvious: his legacy would finally be carved by his bat. That’s what all time batting greats are remembered for, irrespective of how successful, indifferent or dismal their captaincy tenures turned out to be.

To a large extent, Virat cast the Indian team in his own image of a go-getter aggressive outfit, achieved series victories on foreign soil with more regularity, and had spells of disappointments in failing to clinch any ICC trophy success. But, at 33, it isn’t getting any sooner to realise that as one of the finest modern practitioners, Virat needs to give one flourish of undivided attention to his great craft at the crease.

While his approach to batting has shown a marked disdain for feats and numbers, the critics have been pointing to the lack of big runs eluding him since November 2019. To be clear, however, that’s only a part of his more than seven-year stint as Indian skipper. So, any attempt at linking the form slump with the leadership role is short-sighted as well as statistically flawed.

The first five years of his captaincy were one of his most prolific years as a leading batter too, including defining knocks amid testing conditions in England, Australia and South Africa. The same, however, couldn’t be said about the last 25 months. And that’s something that can’t escape a world class performer’s notice, if not leave him worried.

There were glimpses, for instance, of the master technician in Virat working hard to get his judgment, timing and footwork right in his last test as India’s skipper. After a dismal show with the bat in the first test at Centurion and missing out at Johannesburg, he had applied himself intensely for the hard-earned 79 runs off 201 balls in the first innings of the Cape Town test. A tenacious innings of high discipline, cutting out the off-stump push, marking a return of the famed and fluent cover drive and great judgment amid challenging conditions of bounce, pace and movement off the track. What, however, might still have rankled him is how the lapse of concentration in his dismissal for 29 runs in the second innings triggered another Indian batting collapse. In the post-match presser, he wasn’t sparing himself while putting such lapses﹘and the loss of intensity in crucial moments﹘as turning points in a hard fought series.

There has been endless talk about the technical adjustments he needs to return to his best. One of them has been the suggestion to cut back his excessive forward lunge and balance it out with bringing in the backfoot play more in his initial movements at the crease. That basically goes to temper the forward-press approach that a school of modern batsmanship follows on moving tracks. Long time observers of his game have also been of the view that he could explore more square-of-the wicket options for himself to cut the drive-errors.

More than anyone else, Virat could be fighting his own demons of self-doubt that creep in a lean patch. To his credit, he is a keen student of his batting and in the past, he has grasped and overcome some flaws in his batting.

One, for instance, should remember the technical awareness he showed in reversing his fortunes in England in 2018. Four years before, his failure on English pitches against the Anderson-led attack haunted him. In recognising the technical ‘chinks’, he was quite forthcoming in how a default stance for an inswinger made him vulnerable and his movements late to other challenges on the pitch. In 2018, he was even willing to play for English county Surrey to prepare himself for the test series against England later that year. Even though his neck injury came in the way of that stint, Virat worked hard to make technical adjustments. He went to score 593 runs in the five-test series with an average of 59.3, even though India lost 3-1. After having scored quite fluently in Australia and South Africa, Kohli’s success on English soil was like Federer’s Roland Garros moment﹘conquering the elusive with technical dexterity.

In the newfound undivided focus as a batsman, Virat can brighten world cricket with the rare blend of detached technician at the crease and keenly involved performer. For a batter of his sublime greatness, raging into the stump mic in his last test as skipper can never be the enduring image. For all his exuberance and excesses, Virat Kohli is at heart a craftsman with a bat and a very profound technician. The time to come could very well be his years of catharsis﹘pushing boundaries of batting greatness a notch higher.