Virat Kohli was completely different once he took a single to long leg on the 15th delivery.
Virat Kohli had to wait 14 deliveries before opening his account in the second innings. In between was one Matt Henry delivery seaming away and a sharp away-turning delivery by Ajaz Patel that beat his outside edge. Kohli did what was in his control – covering the line and getting beaten happily.
Barring them, his defence was on point; he let the ball come to him and defended under the eyeline. There was also a leg bye that extended his time on a pair. He was one of the five batters to register a duck in the first dig.
He was completely different once he took a single to long leg on the 15th delivery. On the next one, Kohli used the depth of the crease to cut one through the point for his first boundary. He then ran hard between the wickets, taking all close-in singles, and his footwork looked compact ball after ball.
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There was a lot of noise on social media platform X when Kohli played a sweep off Ajaz in the 30th over. The bowler erred on his line, spraying it on the pads, and Kohli just leaned into the shot and nailed it towards the backward square leg for a boundary. It’s hard to recall the last time he employed this stroke, and even if he does, Kohli hardly times them as perfectly as he did this time.
“Virat Kohli sweeping; good news for India,” chirped Dinesh Karthik on air, very conscious of of Kohli’s trust with this shot.
On the previous delivery, he had jumped down the crease and gotten to the pitch of the ball to loft it over the long-off region for a maximum. Then, there was this moment where Kohli played inside the line rather than chasing it when one turned and gripped sharply. He hasn’t tackled spinners with such ease for years.
When he dabbed a Matt Henry’s back-of-a-length delivery between cover and point region to complete his 31st half-century, there was no big celebration, even if the crowd screamed their souls out. It was his first fifty this year, but there was that aim in his eyes, that hunger to translate it into a big one. He’s had numerous starts in the previous couple of years, but big scores have eluded him.
Since 2020, Kohli has eleven 50+ scores, but only twice has he converted them into three-figure scores. Both were on flat decks when the pitch hardly had any demons. That doesn’t mean Kohli hasn’t scored on tricky decks; his counterattacking 76 in Centurion in the Boxing Day Test last year, scoring 58.01% of innings’ runs alone, was a knock of the highest order.
Even his fourth-innings 49 in the WTC Final at The Oval last year was a fine effort in a losing cause. But these scores look subdued for someone with a career conversion rate of 48.33%. Remember, this is someone who hit six double centuries in 17 months at the peak of his career.
He has been dismissed in the 70s six times since 2020. He was unlucky to be run out in one of those and was undone by unplayable deliveries or terrific fielding efforts in the other two dismissals. He should have still converted the remaining three into a big one.
Still, he found ways to get out. In most cases, he committed a similar mistake: not being able to resist poking at the fifth stump line.
That brings us to his latest knock – should we be assured that he is finally back in Test cricket? That’s hard to say because he has often reverted to faulty methods after a bit of success lately, as those 50s and 70s suggest. What we know after this innings is that Kohli still has the Test game to break into an incredible streak of form, but it will need Kohli to believe in Kohli the Test batter again.
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