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The recent end of Virat Kohli’s tenure as Indian captain across all formats has resulted in universal adulation. This should be no surprise since Kohli easily stands amongst the best captains India has ever had but it is hard to find a balanced appraisal of his tenure.
First the good. Kohli’s passion in playing for India and his intense competitive spirit captaining his teams are second to none. If Ganguly removed a longstanding inferiority complex from Indian cricket as captain, Kohli took that notion forward by instilling an “eye for an eye” mindset amongst his “pack” (a more appropriate term for his teams).
Kohli was prepared to lose in order to give his team a chance to win (most famously shown in his very first series as captain at Adelaide in 2014-15). He’s reposed his faith in India’s pace attack and made it the pillar on which some of his greatest successes have been built. Watching India in Test cricket, especially in the latter stages of his tenure, reminds one of Pakistani teams of the past: exciting, volatile, fallible, brilliant, hopeless all at once. Kohli’s unflinching support of Test cricket would be something his successor would do well to imbibe.
And now for the not so good. Perhaps Kohli’s greatest failing has been around team selection. His hyperactive personality has resulted in constant experimentation with a certain template of a player: confident, brash, cast in his own image, and this has cost India dearly in ICC tournaments as well as important Test series abroad. Under Kohli, everyone else was dispensable except him and if he won, it was justification that the team was right (ignoring the fact that the team may have done even better with the right selection). His treatment of Ashwin in particular, in overseas Test matches, has been shameful, given Ashwin’s status as arguably India’s greatest match winner of the past decade and one of the best spinners ever. Pujara and Rahane were both dropped at various times a few years ago for going through rough patches no worse than the one Kohli himself has endured these past few years. And the confusion around the middle order in the 2019 ICC world cup ultimately proved decisive when the top order was blown away by New Zealand in the semi-final.
While Kohli’s aggression has sometimes been a boon, it has also proven to be a curse on occasions. The rush to blindly be positive has resulted in tactical blunders betraying a general lack of planning or indeed properly respecting the opposition. “If we play our best, we will win” was a line we often heard from Kohli, but he never seemed to plan for the fact that a team will rarely be at its best throughout a long tournament. When the moments of adversity inevitably came in big knockout matches, India was exposed and there seemed to be no plan B as his teams caved in.
Finally, a certain cult of personality and lack of appreciation for the institution of Indian cricket is part of Kohli’s legacy. Given his all-powerful status, running afoul of him was a bad career move, but players seemed to outdo each other in shamelessly imitating him, even down to the “growing a beard” ritual to pay obeisance to the captain. Kohli’s send-offs with choice words and body language to opposing batsmen was over the top and unbecoming of an international player let alone an Indian captain. It was a surprise that some opposing batsman did not use the bat to inflict some blows on his way out. The stump mic incident in his last Test as captain was another example of boorish behaviour. The lack of humility in acknowledging his own tactical errors have always stood out in his post-match press conferences where it is invariably a sentiment of “we need to learn and get better”, but the learning never actually happened in his case. Kohli’s role in moulding young players and leaving a settled team for the future pales in comparison with his preceding India captains.
Ultimately, this was Kohli’s track record overseas : he did not manage to win Test series in New Zealand, South Africa, or England (the decisive Test of the 2021 series will be played this summer) and while his team did win against a weakened Australia in 2018-19, he should be honest enough to not take credit for the win against a full strength Australia in 2020-21 since Rahane the captain played a stellar role in that epic series. No ICC tournament wins is well documented.
As with most complex characters, Kohli leaves behind a mixed legacy and one needs to celebrate his many contributions while learning from his mistakes to move Indian cricket forward.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
Also read: It was never about statistics for Virat Kohli. The cricket ground was a theatre of passion