Kohli relishes ‘different role’ in his most successful World Cup
For a change, it’s not about Virat Kohli. And for a change, nobody’s complaining. India have topped the points table in this World Cup and are front-runners for the title, but their best batsman is yet to score a century. Kohli’s highest score so far is 82, and it has been a month since he got this close to his 3rd World Cup hundred.
Playing the second fiddle
It’s not something Kohli is accustomed to in his everyday life. He’s not used to going 10 innings straight without scoring an ODI hundred. He’s not used to being the second-best. But by his own admission in this World Cup, he’s happy to revel in the success of the ‘best ODI batsman in the world’ and cheer for him like a kid. Even if it means spending a little more time in the dressing room than usual. Heck, he’ll even let go of the revered No.3 position if the match situation demands Hardik Pandya’s brute force or Rishabh Pant’s aggression over his flair. It hasn’t been a typical run-fest of a tournament, but that has hardly stopped him from being an unselfish batsman and captain. Kohli has adapted, and he has adapted well.
Kohli not a beast in World Cups?
But Kohli’s run-scoring in this tournament has shed some light on his batting pattern across the three World Cups that he’s been part of. In his debut World Cup game in 2011, he smashed an unbeaten 100 against Bangladesh but went on to register only five two-digit scores with a solitary fifty. In 2015, he repeated the feat of scoring a hundred in the opening match, against Pakistan. His next best score was 46. By that measure, this year’s World Cup has been Kohli’s most successful one yet, and he doesn’t even have a hundred. Just five fifties. And he’s only getting progressively better.
There was a time India’s batting order rallied around the batting genius of Kohli. His consistency with the bat was the vital cog that held the entire unit together. But in the last few years, that notion of dependency seems to be changing gradually. The explosive opening pair of Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma has begun to dominate the landscape of modern-day cricket. And with match-winners like Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and the ‘KulCha’ combo, India are moving away from being known as ‘batting beasts’ to an ‘all-round’ team. The seeds of that change have been sown in this World Cup.
A Kohli special awaits
They say when the going gets tough, the tough get going. As India head into a high-profile semi-final clash against New Zealand, all eyes will be on Rohit Sharma, who is on a record-breaking spree with five World Cup hundreds already. But a few eyes will also search for India’s most iconic batsman and the inevitable hundred that continues to elude him. Will it be a match-winning knock in a steep chase against the Kiwis? Will it come on the grandest stage of the grandest tournament in the final? There couldn’t be a better cherry on the cake.
