India made a statement in the final ODI and Virat Kohli had the last word

There are no certainties in sport. Roger Federer will not win at Wimbledon every year. Cristiano Ronaldo will not score in every match. Mahendra Singh Dhoni will not play the finisher role to perfection every time he walks out to bat. But, like Harsha Bhogle said after India sealed the ODI series against West Indies, there was a glorious inevitability to that Virat Kohli century.

In the four matches preceding this in the series, India played bad cricket for, perhaps, just a couple of hours and yet were facing the prospect of sharing the trophy with West Indies when the coin toss happened in Jamaica. Losing the toss would be the only thing that didn’t go Kohli’s way, as it turned out.

Starting from Mohammed Shami’s return to wicket-taking ways after a gap of over two years, to Ravindra Jadeja running through his 10 overs in a hurry, conceding 27 runs, the bowlers – as they have done all series – barely gave an inch to the West Indies batsmen. It was left to the Indian batsmen then to show that botched chase in Antigua was just a one-off. Chasing 206, on a much easier wicket to bat on admittedly, Kohli and Co had to show that there is not just a gap in quality between the two sides, but a chasm.

And they did just that.

It was the little things that mattered. Shikhar Dhawan – though he faced just the three balls – set the tone with the very first ball he faced, with a thumping boundary through the off-side. Ajinkya Rahane did not take his time to get going. He got busy from the word go.

Even the dot balls he faced had purpose. He was not trying to hang around. His first boundary came off the 11th ball he faced, an elegant off drive. The next three boundaries came off the 16th, 19th and 21st – all in Jason Holder’s third over. He was putting his foot down early, letting the opposition now that this chase won’t be lasting too long. He eventually missed a fifth consecutive half-century, but his lowest score in the series, perhaps, made the strongest case for his place in the ODI side.

And then there was Dinesh Karthik. Intent on a cricket field, stating the obvious, is not a measurable entity. You can’t put a number next to it. But let’s try this. In Antigua, from the first 19 balls he faced, Karthik made two runs and was already back in the pavilion. In Jamaica, from the first 19 balls he faced, Karthik had 20 runs to his name.

At the risk of over-simplifying, that’s an ten-fold improvement from his labouring effort in the fourth ODI. From the minute he walked out to bat, he looked busy, he wanted to get runs under his belt and he wanted to get them fast. He started his innings with a cut past point for two runs and his strike rate did not fall below 100 for the next 35 balls. He ended up with 50 off 52.

The final word in a statement of superiority, as is often the case, came from Virat Kohli himself. It was a run-chase with the series on the line – anyone with a decent instinct for bets, could have placed their house on Kohli coming good. His innings, unlike Rahane and Karthik, started off slow. He was once again tested by Holder’s bouncers. He almost fended one of those to a fielder at gully. But there was one moment that signalled a turn of tide for Kohli.

Alzarri Joseph took a leaf out his captain’s copybook and banged one short, rising up to Kohli’s helmet. There was a deep square leg, hoping Kohli’s arrogance could bring a top edge in his direction. There were two fielders in catching positions, at an arm’s length from each other, at short mid-wicket. What does Kohli do? Fetches it from under his nose, with the MRF sticker on his bat facing the pitch, bludgeons it between those two fielders, with the ball staying on the ground for almost the entire duration of its travel from the middle of his bat to the mid-wicket boundary.

He would go on to play many shots that left would make your daw drop, despite the frequency of how often he plays them. The wristy flicks, the bottom-hand flick over mid-on and of course, the signature cover drives. But in that one moment, when he showed West Indies that he was not going to be pegged back by the bouncers, he made it clear it was going to be his day.

“I don’t like to get out in similar fashion more often,” he said at the post-match press conference. “The reason you succeed at international cricket is that you have to stretch the gap between your mistakes and I think a couple of mistakes from me, getting out in the same manner is something that I don’t really like.

  “So it was more of being a little strict on myself and getting the team across the line, which I knew the victory was inevitable when I got the hundred and it was all about the satisfaction of actually planning the innings out and executing it well and that always feels nice and something that I like to be hard on myself, not getting out in the same manner too many times”  

Kohli’s celebration after a milestone when he is batting is the simplest indicator of how much it means to him. A fifty? Never any reaction. A hundred when is on form? A wide smile with the bats raised to the dressing room. A double hundred on a tough Test match wicket? A leap of joy.

But when he lets out that angry roar, where you can see his veins bulging and his face turns red, like it did in Jamaice after a record-breaking 18th century in a run-chase, you could tell he wanted that badly. A five-match ODI series in West Indies without a Kohli century would have been a statistical anomaly – and with the most Kohli-esque of innings, he righted that wrong on Friday.