Within days of Rohit Sharma calling time on his Test career, before next month’s tour to England. Was he quick to read the room after the abrupt end to Rohit’s Test innings? With talk of Shubman Gill’s early coronation at 25 did he sense palace intrigue and a subtle signal to him? Or was it the case of the 36-year-old father of two no longer having that famous drive in him to deal with the demons in the head that mess up your muscle memory?
Informing the world about his decision to quit on social media he wrote: “The quiet grind, the long days, the small moments that no one sees but that stay with you forever. As I step away from this format, it’s not easy — but it feels right. I’ve given it everything I had, and it’s given me back so much more than I could’ve hoped for.”
Five Tests in England can be daunting for a batsman who these days isn’t sure where his off-stump is – he got out poking at the ball 7 times in his last five-Test series in Australia – and had barely survived the same trauma in the past. Was it why he gave up and did the first, and probably the last, un-Kohli act of his glittering career littered with many moments of incredible mental strength and undying conviction in his skills.
Not really. The batting great can’t be judged so harshly. It is those good old Kohli days that will define his legacy and get talked about for generations.
This England miss, actually a judicious ‘well left’, is just another grim reminder to the reality of aging and the finite problem-solving capacities of the human mind. Virat still has a sculpted body. Those six-packs that send every young cricketer to the gym these days are still in place. Even in his mid-30s, he is a Bolt between wickets. But the fittest too can get jaded, the driven too slow down and even Kings call it a day.
Kohli has retired, but he hasn’t given up. He never does, it’s just that every great story has an end. Once he signs up for a cause he never backs out. That was the original narrative around the boy when he first hit headlines as an 18-year-old.
In his opening first-class season, his commitment to cricket would get embossed in bold on his calling card. It was an incredibly cold December day of 2006 when he landed at Kotla in a Delhi Ranji Trophy jersey hours after his father died. In the dressing room, he broke down but quickly splashed his eyes with water to play a match-saving knock. He left early and lit his father’s pyre.
It was after the sun had set on the toughest day of his life, he would tell his elder brother: “I am going to play this game at the highest level and there is nothing that can distract me from doing that.” That was not to be a sentimental promise made to a distressed family ready to clutch at any straw of optimism thrown at them. It was a life-time undertaking that he remained committed to for the next two decades. Kohli didn’t just play at the highest level but will finish as one of the greatest the game had seen. With ODIs still interesting to him, Kohli can further glorify his legend.
From his under-19 days he never doubted himself or let intimidation overwhelm or undermine him. In the initial round of the Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia he would swagger around the team hotel where most teams stayed, like he owned the place. Once when a tall well-built English player crossed him and gave him a look of disapproval, Kohli was unfazed. With a poker face and steely blank eyes, he just raised his eye-brows and head twice and said: “Why you staring?” The boy blinked and sheepishly snuck away. “Arre inko dikhaana padta hai (One needs to show these guys) who’s the boss,” he would say.
By the end of the tournament, he would make sure that the rest of the teams conceded that he was the boss. The junior India triumph would be followed by his graduation to the senior team and a phase where he lost focus. By his own confession he got caught in leading the ‘cool life’ – partying, eating unhealthy and taking cricket for granted.
Realising that he was drifting from his goal, he would take the challenge of being his old self. He changed his routine and diet. He starved. “One night I was so so hungry that I had thoughts of chewing up the bedsheet,” he had once said. The linen was spared nor was the room service approached, Kohli’s resolve didn’t break. The will to take the tough road remained unbreakable.
That would be the recurring theme to the Kohli story. In 2014, he was in a free-fall on the England tour. He thought he had forgotten batting and would not get his touch back. The promise to his brother, his own pride, ego and image – everything that he valued was broken. He couldn’t sleep and when he finally did, he didn’t wish to get out of the bed. Depressing is how the doctors would identify the problem. Kohli would reach out to Tendulkar and that would start his rehabilitation. Once he ironed the flaws, trusted his game, he got back his purpose in life.
Runs would flow, he would get proclaimed as cricket’s GOAT but fame and fortune would bring bigger challenges. It is around the period, roughly 2022, Kohli would face existential problems.
When the world called him King Kohli, Superman, Chasemaster, he was confused about his own identity. “Who am I as a human being? – He would ask himself. “With your professional identity, somewhere you start losing perspective as a human being,” he would articulate. To live up to the hype around him, Kohli would “fake his intensity”. The world wanted the scowly, shouting Kohli even when he wasn’t in a mood to express those emotions. These candid confessions about his inner self, he would share with the world after he would return from a rare cricket break, something he had never ever done in his life.
Even on his return, Kohli would find it tough to meet the staggering standards he had set for himself. From January 2022 to January 2025, he would just score 4 Test hundreds. None memorable, none with gravitas. Kohli the Test batsman was wilting but he wasn’t giving up. He would train hard, even take philosophical inputs from guru Babas. He kept exploring the world, kept trying to keep the promise he had made, not realising that he had done so many times over.
If there was one cricketer who could have still bounced back in England it had to be Kohli. But he had had enough, it seems. Recently, he had spoken about how the meaning of cricket had changed for him. “You start with wanting to hit the ball and later you go through this whole journey of being someone and dealing with expectations. But then finally again you reach a point … and say I am here to hit the ball,” he had said in an podcast in the middle of his dream run.
He seemed to be enjoying “hitting the ball”, the same way in which he would do when he would swagger in team hotels like he owned them. Going to England would again mean “being someone and dealing with expectations.”
On that magical April night in 2011, after India’s World Cup win at Wankhede, Kohli had beautifully expressed his emotions after carrying sitting on his shoulder on a victory lap. “Tendulkar has carried the burden of the nation for 21 years, it was time we carried him,” he said.
He would go on to do a Tendulkar, be a legend after two decades of high-level batting. Now it is for others to do a Kohli.
