Virat Kohli and the art of batting
Red ball, white ball, IPL, which is just a domestic league, Virat Kohli is challenging himself. It is Virat Kohli's art of living as a cricketer and showing how much more he can contribute.
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Virat Kohli
Lusty hitting and the Indian Premier League are part and parcel of the game. And if one talks of the head-bangers ball which was played out on Sunday night between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians in Bengaluru, one got to see high adrenaline stuff.
Hype, these days, has multiple meanings, many connotations, and what memories it leaves you with. So fast does the IPL play out, in the course of two innings in one match, which is 40 overs, fans tend to forget a few things.
Virat Kohli and Faf du Plessis grabbed the headlines but one cannot take away the lion-hearted effort of unsung Tilak Varma for Mumbai Indians. The pre-match hype was Virat Kohli versus Rohit Sharma, which was bizarre. Cricket is a team sport and these two champions are not really competing with each other. For the record, Kohli is happy minus any load of captaincy.
First things first. No narrative can be complete without a mention of what effort Tilak put in. It was truly like rescuing Mumbai, where Verma deserved the “Tilak” on his forehead for staging such an aggressive onslaught. Rohit and Suryakumar were like Gone With The Wind. Mumbai needed a one-star performer, which was shown by Tilak Varma. His batting looked so simple, so clean, and with great timing. Perhaps, the left-handed aesthetics should be in the collective memory of fans for a longer time. This was no flash-in-the-pan effort. To hammer the hell out of the white ball was not brute force alone. His timing was sweet and the way he made fans go ga ga was lovely.
Bengaluru fans have been waiting for a long to see IPL action. This city and Chennai love IPL, their heroes. There is no exaggeration in saying fans from Bengaluru and Chennai line up outside stadia and pay to watch cricket. What they get to see is valuable, which was first shown by Tilak Varma. His 84 is already being spoken of as something exquisite from a left-hander, a bit in the Yuvraj Singh mode. That may be too much, though, as Yuvraj was a great gambler, a guy who loved taking risks.
That Sunday night effort was one more from Virat Kohli, which defined his hunger
With Tilak Varma, what caught the eye was he had to rebuild runs from ruins. Had it not been for his batting, where nine fours and four sixes caught the eye, Mumbai would have looked even more pathetic. More important, Tilak also encouraged Nehal Wadhera to push along.
Sadly, once RCB started batting, fans cheering had reached a crescendo. For a city that has produced some brilliant cricketers from different eras, from wristy GR Vishwanath to more dour Rahul Dravid and cerebral bowlers — Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath — Bangalore or Bengaluru has a great link with Indian cricket. Well, in the IPL, it’s club cricket. Virat Kohli has a different image. The West Delhi boy who grew up on “chhole bhatture” and then went on very harsh diets to stay fit, embraced Mumbai as his second home after marrying Anushka Sharma.
If there is a home away from home(s) and he loves to have a go, it is Bengaluru. His affair and chemistry with Bengaluru is a natural integration. And to perform here after a long gap because of the pandemic, Virat Kohli was itching to launch his attack. Where did Rohit Sharma go, you may well ask?
Well, he seems to have forgotten a lot of things, of which batting is just a part. His captaincy these days sucks, and for him to not use Jofra Archer straightaway, bought at a big price, was a mistake. With Kohli (82 not out), all this is fine. He is a man who has embraced the highest levels of calmness in his mind. Virat Kohli’s monk-link look, visiting ashrams in the hills plus a famous Shiva temple like Mahakaleshwar in Madhya Pradesh shows how he has become tranquil. Yet, if he is tranquil, Kohli ensures fans go wild.
That Sunday night effort was one more from VK, which defined his hunger. There is no format of cricket in which he is finding a problem. Red ball, white ball, IPL, which is just a domestic league, Virat Kohli is challenging himself. It is Virat Kohli’s art of living as a cricketer and showing how much more he can contribute. Workload management, overload, all this seems so stupid for Virat Kohli.
The key is he has preserved his body, worshipped it, and is able to perform at peak. How long he can do it should not be asked now. He had a bad run till last year. But with big assignments coming up for India, Virat Kohli is the first name you will jot down on Team 11. Not Rohit Sharma. Get that straight.
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S Kannan
(382 Articles Published)