With Virat Kohli retiring from Test cricket, the Indian cricket team would be competing in the five-match Test series in England without the legendary Indian cricketer. Terming Virat Kohli as someone without whom Test cricket would have been a ‘far blander place’, former England captain Michael Vaughan has stated that Test cricket would have lost its appeal had Kohli not been there in recent years.
“More than 30 years, I don’t believe there is any individual who has done more for the Test format than Virat. When he took the captaincy just over a decade ago, I was worried India was losing interest in Test cricket. MS Dhoni was one of the great white-ball players but it felt like he captained a Test team who did not love the format. The game needs India to be madly in love with Test cricket, and that is what Virat fostered as captain. His passion, skill, and the way he talked about Test cricket always being the pinnacle has been a huge shot in the arm for the format. Test cricket would have been a far blander place without him, and there is a chance it would have lost its appeal if he had not been as interested and invested in it,” Vaughan wrote in his column for The Telegraph.
During his 123-Test career, the 36-year-old played 28 Test matches against England and scored a total of 1991 runs in 50 innings with an average of 42.36. Out of those 28 Test matches, Kohli played 17 Tests in England against the hosts and scored 1096 runs including two hundreds and five half-centuries. While England bowler James Anderson got his wicket seven times in Test matches, Vaughan remembered the fighting contest between the two and shared how he was looking towards Kohli featuring in the upcoming England tour. “All of his tours of England were up against James Anderson and Stuart Broad so I was really looking forward to seeing him take on a new England attack. His battles with Anderson, not least at Edgbaston in 2018, were magnificent, a great spectacle. It was a proper heavyweight contest, with two world beaters going up against each other. It was so enthralling. Jimmy often had the wood over Kohli and with him gone, I thought he’d come out and play with a real flamboyancy this summer, and go on the attack. We haven’t seen much of that from him in England, it’s been more about his defensive strength, skill, touch, technique and patience. In other parts of the world, he played with unbelievable aggression,” Vaughan added.
The former England captain also talked about how he thought India would have handed him the captaincy for the England tour in the absence of Rohit Sharma, who had announced his retirement from Tests days ago. “India will miss him. I do wonder if he fancied another crack at the captaincy but wasn’t given that opportunity. I think if he wanted it, I would have given it to him for this tour because there was some unfinished business in England. They would have won that series in 2021 if they had not left because of COVID, and by the time they came back a year later he had stepped down and England were a different side,” write Vaughan.
