It's all I know

A short reflection on the sadness of Kohli's Test decline

There is a narrative afoot in some corners of social media that 36-year-old Kohli is paying the price for the stubbornness that adorned 29-year-old Kohli's crown. There is some fact in this assertion. Despite repeated dismissals in the channel, he has been unable to put the cover drive away or transfer his weight decisively onto the back foot.

But at the same time, could anything be further away from the truth? He started his accursed tour of Australia by batting outside the crease and wielding the bat tap — both recent additions to his craft most likely warranted by India's commitment to attacking cricket and the subsequent need for a loose front arm. It took him only one innings, amidst the variable bounce of Perth, to nip it in the bud and bat inside the crease. As this series has progressed, he has got less and less front-on, culminating in the Sydney Test where he seemed so side-on that to many observers he looked like a completely different batter.

Perhaps the best metaphor for Kohli's summer of futility was his offstump guard in Sydney. The offstump guard, popularized in contemporary Test cricket by England's batch of makeshift red-ball batters in 2020-21, was the child of necessity. A long season away from the Test format, combined with an excess of white-ball cricket in the previous decade, had rendered first-class batters in England incapable of judgment outside the offstump. Batting on middle and off provided a nice compromise: leave anything outside your eyeline and play at everything else.

The problem was that it produced the opposite effect. England batters averaged just a tick over 20 outside offstump against pace, down from 28 in the previous three summers. The percentage of balls they left in the channel only marginally rose. Cricket is a game of instincts. A lifetime of jabbing at balls pitched just outside offstump had confounded their sudden decision to leave these same balls. They were now wafting at balls they wished to leave, because doing so was second nature.

Like Kohli in Sydney. Enough has been said about how aspects of his game that were once strengths have been turned into weaknesses. His persistent tendency to push forward and his eagerness to play the cover drive are examples. Kohli adopted the offstump guard in Sydney so that it would put him in closer proximity to the ball to whisk out the cover drive, and so that he could leave anything pitched outside off. A perfect solution in theory. But burdens of the past weigh down unyieldingly on the present. The human condition entails having the power to change the present, not the past. A lifetime of preparation dictates that Kohli presses forward. How can one deny muscle memory?

Through all this, he must be realizing that there is only so much control athletes have over outcomes. A wise Kohli recently wrote in his foreword to Glenn Maxwell's autobiography: "Deeper into my career, I realized that our world view as younger men wasn't the only way to succeed. Forever combative, always on the edge, can lend you energy but can ultimately be exhausting." Is it possible that he is re-evaluating the other guiding principle of his career today, that strong men can will their way out of even the darkest of dens with nothing but tenacity? Only he can know, but even he must appreciate the smallness of athletic fervour at this moment. You might wake up one day and decide to change, but that doesn’t mean that circumstances will change around you.

Kohli is the toxic boyfriend who has turned over a new leaf and seeks to set things right with the girlfriend but realizes that actions have consequences. He is the orthodox boxer with a damaged left eye who still wishes to keep punching because he cannot conceive of a life away from the ring. He is the fallen hero who looks his needy friend helplessly in the eye and whimpers, "It's all I know," because he truly has nothing else to give. The forward press and the cover drive once made Virat Kohli. They must now break him.

The sadness of Kohli's demise is that this stage of his career was what everything was supposed to be for. The tens of thousands of ab crunches, the zillion power burpees, the endless early nights, the infinite cravings kept at bay: they were all supposed to be so that he could bat like his 29-year-old self when he was 36. He said so himself. It was so that he could continue playing Test cricket, the format he cherishes the most, years after his international white-ball retirement. Now it seems only a matter of time before his Test average, which once provoked comparisons with Steve Smith, dips below 45.

He has tried. But he has not tried enough. He has been lucky. But not lucky enough. He has been open to change. But not been open enough. It has been a summer of contradictions for Virat Kohli, where he has simultaneously been away from the runs and in the center of the attention; where he has simultaneously been defiant and undone. There is no point to intellectualizing his barren run anymore. Only sadness remains.