When Mahendra Singh Dhoni announced his retirement from test cricket at the end of 2014, vice captain, Virat Kohli, was pegged as his successor. Doubts around the young captain’s preparedness for the role have been rife as Kohli is known to be an aggressive player and opponent. Currently in his first match as captain of the test team, against Bangladesh in Fatullah near Dhaka, Kohli seems subdued. In this excerpt from Soumya Bhattacharya’s After Tendulkar (published by Aleph), Bhattacharya focuses on Kohli when he was a promising young cricketer who lost and then found his way.
In the narrative of Kohli’s career, the heroics in Australia capped a chapter that could well be titled ‘Rehabilitation and Redemption.’ The chapter preceding that, the opening one in the Kohli story, would be called ‘Young Star: Found and Lost.’
In December 2006, Kohli’s father passed away. A few hours after the tragedy, Kohli was back in the field, resuming his Ranji Trophy innings for Delhi against Karnataka. His innings saved the match for Delhi that day. He thought he owed it to his team, to his father, to his chosen sport, to himself. He was 17 years old at the time. Two years later, Kohli, leading India’s Under-19 team at the World Cup, became only the second India Under-19 captain to win that particular trophy.
Those who did not know of his Ranji Trophy innings on the day of his father’s death knew of him now. They saw him on TV, a pudgy teenager with a foul mouth; a young player who in triumph swore, gestured and snarled like a maniac. ‘Brash’, ‘brat’ and ‘arrogant’ before long became easy shorthand to describe Kohli. In the public imagination his image was fixed: he was another of those loutish big-city teenagers you saw at malls and restaurants and multiplexes. The talent, though, was undeniable. He was already being talked about as someone who would soon play for India. He did. Against Sri Lanka in an ODI series in August 2008. Before that, though, there was a season of the IPL, in which he had been picked for the Royal Challengers Bangalore team. Young women found Kohli attractive. Kohli found the parties, where there were a lot of young women, attractive. Blinded by the white heat of newfound celebrity, Kohli lost his way.
When England toured India in the winter of 2008, Kohli found that he was no longer in the ODI team. He now realizes that those were distracting months, a period that, seen from the vantage point of hindsight, threatened to finish him as a cricketer.
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