Boria Majumdar
Virat Kohli is finally an IPL champion. For 18 long years, the Pied Piper of Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) has waited for his moment. He has given it his all time and again, and come close on several occasions. For almost every cricket fan, Kohli with the IPL trophy is a picture-postcard moment. Much like Sachin Tendulkar having to wait 22 years for the World Cup, Kohli, the protégé, waited 18 long years for this moment. Finally, the wait is over, and how.
Kohli wasn’t the star of the final. Rather, he had played a fairly sedate innings. It was his teammates, Krunal Pandya and Jitesh Sharma, who did the star turns. They stepped up when it mattered the most, and made it special for Kohli.
But that’s not the point of this piece. In fact, this copy is about something fundamentally different. It is about a comment made by Kohli in the immediate aftermath of winning the title. While everyone expected him to be euphoric about the achievement and celebrate it, he did something entirely different. While he did celebrate and justly so, he made a comment that set him apart – showed why he is different and why he is regarded as a once-in-a-generation player. He said this achievement, despite its humungous nature, still ranked five notches below Test-match cricket. Yes, that’s exactly what he said. This is what stands out about Kohli. Despite all the glamour of T20 cricket, he remains a Test cricket devotee.
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Live from Ahmedabad: Crazy RCB fans celebrate first IPL title win https://t.co/QTMOhsGgtG
— RevSportz Global (@RevSportzGlobal) June 3, 2025
Make no mistake, there will never be a 100,000-plus crowd watching a Test match in Ahmedabad. There will not be the same vibe or the same madness. And yet, Kohli knows the real deal. Yes, the IPL is the most lucrative tournament and T20 the most commercially viable form of the game. But for the greatest cricketer of this era, it is Test cricket that will forever be the jewel in the crown. That Kohli said it helps the game and helps the format. And that’s what earns him respect.
In saying what he did, was there something that he left unsaid? Will he reconsider his retirement from Test cricket? He still has the game, and would have been stellar for India in England. Will he give it a second thought, and can the fans still dream of seeing him in whites? Like the RCB dream, this too lives on.