King Kohli calls it a day in Test cricket

Such was his revolutionary impact on the game that for shaping Indian cricket wholly in his own image, the least Virat Kohli deserved was a farewell Test match; perhaps even an entire series. Instead, choosing to embrace the same suddenness as his rapid and meteoric entry into the format, Kohli bowed out with a simple goodbye on May 12, just a handful of runs short of the 10,000-run mark, many months after what will now be known as his final Test match in Sydney in January and only a few short weeks before the start of India’s next Test campaign, in and against England beginning June.

In a sport that encourages a player to achieve landmarks above all else, Kohli ended his red-ball career on the cusp of a big one, with 9230 Test runs, placing him fourth on the list of Indian run-getters, behind Sachin Tendulkar (15,921), Rahul Dravid (13,288) and Sunil Gavaskar (10,122). It goes to prove once again that Kohli was always beyond collecting statistics for the sake of it, or why else would he have declared himself on an unbeaten 254 against South Africa in Pune – his highest Test score – back in 2019, when a triple century was there for the taking?

It tells you that Kohli’s focus was always on the team and on plotting its betterment. On those fronts, he arguably had a greater influence than the other legends who finished above him on the runs-chart, for it was Kohli who single-handedly changed the way the game was played and consumed in this country, with his refreshing attitude and never-say-die approach.

Ushered into a transitioning Test side as a 22-year-old in mid-2011, Kohli first rose to the might of his own expectations on an otherwise dismal tour of Australia in 2011-12 (India were blanked 0-4) with a maiden hundred in the fourth and final Test in Adelaide. Incidentally, at the end of that Test, Dravid and VVS Laxman called it quits a few months later, allowing youngsters such as Kohli, Ravichandran Ashwin and Cheteshwar Pujara to take Indian cricket into a new dawn, which they did with elan. Similarly, the recent Border Gavaskar Trophy, also played and lost by a transitioning Indian side, was the setting for the retirements of three veterans – Ashwin, 38, during the series itself at the end of the Adelaide Test, followed by the retrospective retirements of Rohit Sharma, 38, and Kohli, 36, within a week of each other in early May.

It simply had to be in Australia, for this is where Kohli cut his teeth as not only a batsman of great pedigree, but also a natural-born leader. Handed over the reins by MS Dhoni in the 2014-15 series Down Under, Kohli rang in his captaincy debut with twin hundreds (115 and 141), setting the template for a team’s ability to fight for the impossible, albeit in a losing cause in Adelaide. He would score a total of four Test hundreds on that tour, and seven in Australia over his career, including his final and 30^th Test hundred in Perth last year.

Under his stewardship, the victories soon began to pile up, as Kohli forged his team with an insatiable hunger to win at all costs. No one captained India in more matches than Kohli in the long-form (68 times) and won more games (40), far more than his great predecessors in MS Dhoni (27) and Sourav Ganguly (21). Several of those wins were registered in India, where Kohli simply didn’t lose a Test series during his long tenure. Not just that, he turned a nation that was historically reliant on spin-bowling to take 20 wickets into a fast bowling one. When Kohli was leader, Ishant Sharma and Umesh Yadav learnt to flourish, while the likes of Mohammed Shami, Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj were discovered and given wings.

Some other remarkable achievements cannot be captured in numbers. In 2012, Kohli went from chubby to chiselled with his new-found passion for fitness and ended up causing nothing short of a revolution with his lifestyle. Soon enough, most of the cricketers who followed Kohli into the team were lean and mean and fitted with a six-pack, while others took their admiration a step further by sporting tattoos on their sleeves and beards on their chins like their hero. Tendulkar recognised this achievement of Kohli’s in his tribute post on X: “You have given Indian cricket so much more than just runs – you have given it a new generation of passionate fans and players. Congratulations on a very special Test career.”

But Kohli’s proudest achievement in the Test arena, undoubtedly, was to lead India to victory for the first time in a Test series in Australia in its history, beating the hosts 2-1 over four Tests. When his squad beat Australia on the following tour as well in 2020-21 (largely in Kohli’s absence, due to the birth of his child), India had qualified for the first-ever final of the World Test Championships. Kohli’s side lost to New Zealand in that decider, and shortly after he relinquished his leadership, happy to play the remainder of his career as a specialist batsman. It was in this role that Kohli was expected to tour England as a Test cricketer in June, having even represented Delhi in first-class cricket after a gap of 12 years in the Ranji Trophy in early February.

But quite unexpectedly, possibly due to his dwindling form in the whites and perhaps even due to a young and growing family, Kohli seemed to have no hesitation in calling it a day, leaving the team and the game poorer without his presence and services. In a social media post he wrote: “As I step away from this format, it’s not easy – but it feels right. I have given it everything I had, and it’s given me back so much more than I could’ve hoped for… I’ll always look back at my Test career with a smile.”

So will fans of Indian cricket, and admirers of the game at large.

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