The year 2020 has been an exception but, it would not be a stretch to say that in the recent past the amount of men’s international cricket played around the world was perhaps at an all time high. Top cricketers are constantly playing one format or the other, shuttling across countries for tours (or leagues) and in all that time, they do the bare minimum of media work. One does not get to hear too many patient interviews from the top players – pre-match and post-match conferences are the most one can hope for and those are, at their best, fragmented and, at their worst, rushed and cliched.
But in January 2017, during England’s tour of India, former England captain Nasser Hussain and an excellent team at Sky Cricket managed to give the cricketing world something rare: a technical peek behind the run-machine that is Virat Kohli.
To understand where Kohli was, in terms of his own form at that point, you only have to look at his numbers from 2016. The Indian captain averaged more than 75 in all three international formats: 75.93 in Tests, 92.37 in ODIs, 106.83 in T20Is. And let’s not forget the sensational year he had in IPL where he averaged a ridiculous 81.08 while scoring 973 runs that included four centuries.
Tests, ODIs or T20Is, 2016 was the year where Virat Kohli proved he was the king of all formats
Virat Kohli's all-format statistics by year
| Mat | Inns | Runs | Ave | 100 | 50 | 4s | 6s | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| year 2008 | 5 | 5 | 159 | 31.80 | 0 | 1 | 21 | 1 |
| year 2009 | 10 | 8 | 325 | 54.16 | 1 | 2 | 36 | 3 |
| year 2010 | 27 | 25 | 1021 | 48.61 | 3 | 7 | 93 | 5 |
| year 2011 | 43 | 47 | 1644 | 39.14 | 4 | 10 | 152 | 9 |
| year 2012 | 40 | 46 | 2186 | 53.31 | 8 | 10 | 238 | 14 |
| year 2013 | 43 | 43 | 1913 | 53.13 | 6 | 10 | 212 | 23 |
| year 2014 | 38 | 47 | 2286 | 55.75 | 8 | 12 | 228 | 33 |
| year 2015 | 31 | 37 | 1307 | 38.44 | 4 | 3 | 119 | 12 |
| year 2016 | 37 | 41 | 2595 | 86.50 | 7 | 13 | 266 | 19 |
| year 2017 | 46 | 52 | 2818 | 68.73 | 11 | 10 | 265 | 36 |
| year 2018 | 37 | 47 | 2735 | 68.37 | 11 | 9 | 277 | 23 |
| year 2019 | 44 | 46 | 2455 | 64.60 | 7 | 14 | 240 | 34 |
| year 2020 | 15 | 16 | 457 | 30.46 | 0 | 3 | 38 | 7 |
Among other things during this chat with Hussain, Kohli spoke honestly about his horror Test series in England in 2014 and how he worked to tweak his stance after that.
“I used to stand at two leg (middle stump) and my stance was pretty closed and then I figured out that after the initial movement my toe wasn’t going towards point rather it was towards cover point, so anyway my hip was opening up initially.
“So to get the feel of the ball, I had to open up my hip as I was too side on. Anyway, I had too much of a bottom hand grip and I didn’t have too much room for my shoulder, to adjust to the line of the ball, so it was getting too late when it swung in front of my eyes.”
Kohli said that widening the stance came after hours of practice where he used to have someone record him from a side angle to make sure his toe was pointing in the right direction. It was not easy, even if he made batting look ridiculously so in that purple patch.
“This change has become easy now but it was not so at the beginning. I was batting three hours a day. I had cramps in my forearms by the end of the week. I did that for about 10 days. You know in golf they say you have to hit a shot 400-500 times before you can perfect that shot. So it was more about precise practice as I wanted to tune my head to play that way. I wasn’t used to forward pressing as I was waiting for the ball to clip it off my leg or waiting for the short ball,” he said.
And in that transformational phase of his career, a certain Sachin Tendulkar played a part too.
“There (in his forward press) Sachin helped as he told me that you have to approach a fast bowler just like you approach a spinner. One has to get on top of the ball and not worry about pace or swing, you’ve got to get towards the ball and give the ball a lesser chance to move around and trouble you. That piece of advice helped me and it became my second nature,” Kohli said.
It is one thing for a batsman to talk in that detail about his technique, it is a completely different matter to walk that talk. Kohli did just that in Pune against England in a stunning run-chase.
“You only have to look at social media to see how much Kohli’s peers respect him – and the short-arm jab that sent Chris Woakes for six in Pune was one of the best cricket strokes I have ever seen – so he is unquestionably the best batsman in the world right now,” Hussain wrote in a column for the Daily Mail not long after the interview aired.
Indeed, every Indian cricket fan (or fan of the game, period) will remember that Kohli shot against Woakes in a run-chase that showed again why he was a master at the art. A coach cannot teach it to a batsman... it is just sheer individual brilliance.
“I sensed when speaking to Kohli and watching him out here, that people make targets, as in ‘this is as good as I can get and I can’t get any better than that’,” Hussain later told Sky Sports after the phenomenal innings in Pune.
“I think what Kohli is trying to do is push the boundary and raise the bar of everything he does. No-one says to him ‘being captain in three forms is too much for you’, no one says ‘you can chase 300 but can you chase 350 from 63-4?’ Here is a bloke who is supremely talented but is constantly trying to tell himself and push himself to be better and better. That is a dangerous combination.
“I read out here that he prefers Ronaldo to [Lionel] Messi. Messi was given a lot of natural ability but he prefers Ronaldo, who has made himself the footballer that he is and pushed himself on and off pitch – and that is what Kohli has done in cricketing terms.”
Indeed, it was a masterclass of masterclasses as two great students of the game came together to provide 16 minutes of unmissable cricket discussion.
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