Transitions don’t come with a notice, especially when it’s a team sport as layered as cricket. After two years, a feeling has grown that the time to prepare for a future without Virat Kohli could arrive any day. It did happen last month in Hyderabad, albeit for only a few matches, but it surprised every stakeholder in its wake. The reason is that Kohli was in the process of hitting his gold standard of batting with an average of 55.91 last year.
Considering the unprecedented, extended, and alarming dry spell that he had to endure preceding 2023, there couldn’t have been a greater reaffirmation of India’s blind faith in Kohli. Perhaps it also subconsciously postponed the need to find a rightful heir apparent.
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 in Hyderabad, which was already calming at 80/1, carried more promise because KL Rahul was to come. India’s batting remained contextual and purposeful as long as he was at the crease.
At Visakhapatnam, however, Shreyas Iyer offered no comfort at all. Due to Rahul and Iyer being unavailable for selection, the question of who will fill Kohli’s significant shoes is becoming more and more inevitable, if not downright unsettling.
It’s odd, as India has always managed to 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. The extent of Kohli’s absence’s impact on India in the remaining three Tests remains to be determined. 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 has been 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. At Hyderabad, India lacked the skill needed to last on tricky crumbling pitches, as evidenced by their fourth-inning average of 53.33 at home, which was better than Tendulkar’s 46.94.
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. In the fourth Test of that series, England reached a 400-run peak at Wankhede, but Kohli scored 235 and guided 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 seems to be in desperate need of similar first-inning assurance, now more than ever.
The 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’s lack of commendable work and lack of fitness has made it difficult for him to stay in the race. Rishabh Pant could have been a short-term but highly effective substitute, but there is still no exact date for his 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.
Despite his efforts, Gill has not even come close to matching 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 that Kohli has long been the main man to have raised the ceiling of India’s dominance, particularly at home. He knows how to overcome 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. It has been a sobering experience to lose that edge in such an important series.
