RevSportz Comment
No team sport lends itself to number-crunching and obsession with individuals quite like cricket. If you look at Virat Kohli’s figures for 2023, as an example, they are stellar.
After close to three years where very few breaks went his way, 2023 was Kohli’s time to remind those watching that his race is far from run. But then, the World Test Championship (WTC) final at The Oval in June and the World Cup final in Ahmedabad offered brutal reminders that a sportsperson’s time at the top is finite, and that the door is nearly closed on Kohli’s hopes of holding aloft another global trophy.
A comparison with Steven Smith, one of the other greats of the era, is most instructive. By his own lofty standards, Smith has had an indifferent 2023 — averaging 43.16 in 11 Tests, and scoring just three half-centuries in 15 ODI innings.
Kohli’s numbers — a Test average of 55.7 and six ODI tons from 24 innings — are markedly superior. But Smith added two more winners’ medals to an already well-stocked trophy cabinet. Kohli probably doesn’t even remember where he kept or threw the runners-up mementos. Each man knows what really matters.
That said, what Kohli did in 2023 deserves to inspire another generation of young cricketers. Graeme Souness, captain of the legendary Liverpool football team of the early 1980s, is one of those who scoffs at how often media pundits and fans use/abuse the word ‘great’. “A great player doesn’t have one great season or year,” Souness is fond of saying. “He contributes to his team week in, week out.”
Even when the runs dried up in the Covid years, there was never any doubting Kohli’s commitment. No one trained harder, no one was more animated on the field, and few were as disappointed when things didn’t fall into place.
You can analyse trigger movements, bat flow and other technical details for days and weeks. But Kohli is one of the all-time greats — and in his case, there is absolutely no doubt that the G word is deserved — for an entirely different reason. At the age of 35, he continues to raise the bar when it comes to fitness and effort.
Ultimately, it comes down to how badly you want it, and the more mellowed 2023 version is no different in that regard from the brash, obscenity-spouting teenager of 2008.
There were times in 2023 when Kohli batted with such calmness that you waited in vain for a storm that never came. There were shades there of the later-day Sachin Tendulkar, in the remorseless and largely risk-free accumulation of runs while eschewing some of the eye-catching flourishes of old. This was nowhere more apparent than during this World Cup, when Kohli reveled in this role as India’s anchor man.
He reeled off three centuries and six 50s in 11 innings and, after years of scrutiny of his performance in knockout games, finished the tournament with knocks of 117 and 54. And it wasn’t as though he tuk-tuked his way to 765 runs. That unprecedented aggregate came at a strike-rate of over 90, which was quite superb for the role that had been assigned to him.
The century drought in Test cricket also ended, with hundreds against Australia (in Ahmedabad) and West Indies (Trinidad). But such is the cruel nature of sporting competition, especially at its sharp end, that millions and perhaps even Kohli himself will distil a remarkable year down to just three strokes.
A brute of a delivery from Mitchell Starc taking the shoulder of the bat when he had made just 14, and a Scott Boland delivery in the outside-off-stump channel that he nicked to Smith’s right at second slip to be out for 49. Both those dismissals came in a WTC final where India were soundly beaten.
But it was the third that was, literally, the unkindest cut of all. The deflection down past backward point is as much a Kohli staple in ODI cricket as the clip through mid-wicket. But on a slow Ahmedabad pitch that India misread horribly, his attempt to play the stroke off Pat Cummins cannoned into the stumps off the inside edge.
Kohli, the man who rarely squanders a start, was gone for 54. Had he stayed even 10 more overs, the final narrative could have been rather different.
But what-ifs and could-haves have no place in sport, only in the minds of tormented fans. And even as he looks back on a year when he did so much right, Kohli will rue those three moments when his decision-making, his beloved bat and the body he trains so hard weren’t quite in sync.