Instead of comparing Virat Kohli to other batsmen, let’s enjoy him for what he is

In recent decades, the marketing of team sports has come to focus on individual stars. This can take the form of prizes or rankings, such as Player of the Match awards in cricket or football’s Ballon d’Or, or in promotional campaigns that highlight individual rivalries. American team sports, with their Most Valuable Player awards and large pay differences between players, have long been this way; cricket and football are newer converts.

Many figures within these sports, such as Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, believe that individual awards should have no place in a team game. Recognised as what they are – marketing tools – they are harmless enough. But an obsession with the relative value of individuals can distract from what is of real importance: collective success. And the practice of comparing great individuals to each other – Messi vs Ronaldo, Michael Jordan vs LeBron – diminishes our ability to enjoy them while we can.

In Virat Kohli, Indian cricket has a batsman of increasingly undeniable greatness. Cricket fans, journalists, and commentators argue constantly about the relative extent of that greatness. It is time that we stopped comparing Kohli to other batsmen, so as to properly appreciate him for what he is.

Comparisons prevent proper appreciation

Kohli is burdened with two sets of comparisons. From 2013 or so, he has been placed in the company of the three other outstanding batsmen – all right-handers who bat in the top/middle order – of his generation: Joe Root, Steve Smith, and Kane Williamson. And his status as India’s leading batsman, Test No. 4 and most marketable star have led to comparisons with his former teammate and childhood hero, Sachin Tendulkar.

There are at least two reasons why such comparisons, as diverting as they might be, prevent a proper appreciation of Kohli. First, reliant as they are on often crude quantitative measures of performance, they tell us little and satisfy no one. Statistics are cited or refuted to support a pre-existing bias in favour of Kohli (or Root, or Smith, or Williamson), rather than to illuminate.

Even the most sophisticated statistics are ill-equipped to convincingly assess players of different eras. In a team game, individual statistics are always of limited value and importance. In the case of Kohli, much of what makes him a great and compelling cricketer cannot be quantified: his perpetual-motion restlessness in the field; the selflessness and generosity he shows towards his teammates; his respect for Test cricket; and the manner in which, in home Tests, he urges the crowd forward in support of his team.

Can’t quantify greatness

The same is true of the players that he is compared to. It is difficult, if not impossible to quantify Root’s achievement in defying the restrictive conventions of English cricket by his aggressive approach at No. 3, or Williamson’s in holding together a thin batting lineup, or Smith’s ability to make an unorthodox technique work in Test cricket.

Those Kohli fans who believe that he is already better than Tendulkar might have certain statistics on their side. But Tendulkar’s contribution to the psychological evolution of Indian batsmanship – giving Indians the confidence that they could take on the fastest bowling with aggressive strokeplay – cannot be quantified. Nor can the burden he shouldered as the first truly deified star of Indian cricket, a personification of player with country comparable to Diego Maradona, in a country thirty times as populous. The ways in which Tendulkar enabled Kohli’s greatness elude reductive discussions of who was the greater batsman.

Assessing Kohli against other batsmen is also a rejection of the lessons we ought to take from his own play and words,. Kohli is often described as brash or aggressive – for reasons of lazy aesthetic conservatism, rather than any fault of his own – but he has distinguished himself by his generosity, humility, and team-first focus.

After a match-winning innings by his teammate AB de Villiers in the 2016 Indian Premier League, Kohli said, “That should end a lot of debates as to who is the best going around…I just bow down to him.” After the recently concluded Mumbai Test match – in which his 235 set up a series-sealing victory – he said that “50 to 60%” of the credit for the team’s successes should go to all-rounder Ravichandran Ashwin.

He also said one of his priorities as captain had been to get his players to forget about personal milestones. On the individual rivalries that broadcasters trumpet, he said: “That’s all for TRPs…As cricketers, honestly, it’s far from what we think about.” Indian cricket has spent far too long glorying in individual greatness and personal milestones. Virat Kohli and Anil Kumble are working to correct that, and fans and journalists should take the hint.

Kohli vs Sachin will get us nowhere

None of this is to say that comparisons between individual cricketers have no value. We should distinguish between comparisons that are narrowly evaluative – who is the better batsman – and those that are illustrative. Arguing about Kohli versus Sachin will get us nowhere. But comparing the two in broader, more descriptive ways illuminates their differences, and thus the range of forms that cricketing greatness can take.

Tendulkar cared deeply about personal milestones – recall his sulk on being denied a double-century by Rahul Dravid in Multan in 2004, or his torturous pursuit of a 100th international hundred. Yet while Kohli rarely innovates, sticking to a traditional set of shots, Tendulkar perfected virtually every known stroke and developed a few of his own.

Tendulkar was a prodigy who arrived in Test cricket, a perfectly formed batsman and peaked between the ages of 23 and 26 (with a second peak between 36 and 38); Kohli began with deep and obvious flaws, but has improved with every year, such that at 28 his ceiling is not yet in sight. And – the most profound difference – Tendulkar was weighed down by captaincy, seeming to overthink every decision, and batting with less freedom, while Kohli has thrived, both as a batsman and a leader.

None of these differences help us to resolve the debate over who was the greater batsman or cricketer. Comparing Kohli to his peers or his predecessors can, however, illuminate the particular quality of his greatness. In the decade or so that we have left of watching him, we should be happy to marvel at that greatness – rather than worrying about where he ranks in today’s hierarchy of batsmanship, or in history’s.