It is a fall that many Indian cricket fans are not able to digest. The steep drop in Kohli’s form over the last 12 months has left the King’s fans anguished.
He had been having a poor run during Covid, but we fans believed in the adage “this too shall pass” and when he came out of the rut with a T20 century against Afghanistan, the massive Kohli fan base heaved a sigh of relief.
Each new peak he scaled – highest score in T20 world cup, that innings against Pakistan at the MCG, top scoring in the ODI world cup proved that the covid induced blip was spoken in the past tense. Sadly, this phase seemed to be ephemeral. His 2024 T20 world cup batting proved that he was no longer the same. The swings and misses, the desperate slogs were indicating all is not well.
The problem was that the world noticed it, not him. He seemed oblivious to the decline that had set in, the inescapable cruelty that comes in the form of age.
Cricket is a funny game. At the outset it looks easy, not very physically demanding. While it is somewhat true, it misses how fatal and final a single ball call be. In any sport – tennis, badminton, football, volleyball- a false stroke, a mishit, a wrong pass might not prove fatal. It would not determine the result of the match. But, in cricket – one false stroke can mean curtains for an innings. Ten false strokes early in the ten innings means your career is on the edge.
Why is cricket so difficult? Let us go into the physics of it. The distance between the two creases is about 18 meters, a ball bowled at 140 Kmph takes about 0.44 seconds to traverse this distance. That is the time available for a better to judge line, length, swing, seam and plan a stroke or defense. When the muscles, reflexes are young, this looks like child’s play – when the hand eye co-ordination, body, the reflexes slow down – this looks labored and prone to susceptibility.
The errors creep in when the mind says it is possible, the body reacts and in that millisecond of milliseconds, the gap between thought and execution happens. Kohli’s repeat failures outside the off stump are the result of this. The practiced mind having seen the ball outside the off stump being gloriously driven to the covers compels the body to react. The practiced body reacts but the milliseconds of inefficiency convert a middle of the bat stroke to an edge.
The glory becomes an ignominy.
This is the unyielding impact of age. It happened to the greatest. What separates an SRT who played well till 40, a Gavaskar whose best test innings was his last one was that they trained the mind to accept its fallibilities. They conditioned the mind to accept that the what the body could once do, it cannot do now. They changed their game.
Kumar Sangakkara is a modern great- one of the few batsmen whose average in the latter part of his career was significantly higher than the earlier part. He was at his prolific best in 2014 (his penultimate year in tests) scoring 1400 runs. When asked how he became better with time, he cited evolution - changing his grip, his stance, his strokes almost everything to stay relevant. He added guile to his skill. Else, he said – he would have been easily sorted out by the bowlers. This evolution would not have been possible with an inflated ego and overconfidence.
Is Kohli suffering because he did not evolve? Looks like that, sadly. Today all a captain must do is to get a left arm spinner in sub continental tracks or a pacer to bowl outside the off stump in SENA countries to get him out.
For such a storied career to come to such an inglorious end purely because of the unwillingness to change – it is such an unfortunate price to pay.
