How Virat Kohli Moulded Himself Over the Years to Become India's Most Unlikely Test Captain

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.

‘Those were the darkest months. After all he was just a young man, barely out of his teens, and the culture at Royal Challengers Bangalore was like that,’ Sharma told me. ‘He got carried away with all the partying in the evening. I had to counsel him, scold him, use all the tricks in the book. I had to tell him that whatever he is, he is because of his cricket. I said, “There are lots of young men smarter than you, richer, more handsome. No one knows of them. You are here today because of your cricket. Lose that, and you will lose everything.” Once he realized how true that was, he sorted himself out.’

And how he sorted himself out. When he returned to the India team as a fixture in the Champions Trophy in South Africa in September 2009 (having played in the one game—and scored 2 not out—in a multi-nation tournament in Sri Lanka just before that), he was a different player.

The hours in the gym had paid off. So had the new diet. Once a fan of biryani, kababs and butter chicken, Kohli had eliminated oil, sugar and salt from his diet. He had shed his roly-poly look and appeared toned, honed, made for the splash of advertisers who would soon begin queuing up for his endorsement. His technique was much sounder; his play had a solidity to harness the swashbuckling shotmaking.

Speaking to ESPNcricinfo, Kohli described how he had wrenched himself out of the abyss into which he had found himself slipping so soon after beginning his international career. ‘I spent twice as much time on the field. I didn’t feel like hanging out with friends or going for a party for one and a half years. And never on an evening did I feel like I have had enough of hard work and I need to party, I deserve one night with my friends. For one-and-a-half years straight, I was just spending time working in the gym or in the field, practising. I would come back and lie down, thinking that I should get ten hours of sleep, I should get proper sleep for my body. I taught myself to think that way—just love each and every minute on the field. And I started to enjoy my batting much more and felt very confident about myself. It was all about cutting out all the distractions I had and just focusing on cricket full time. My only aim was to get back into the team.’

The runs began to flow. By the time he arrived in Australia in December 2011, he had already scored eight ODI hundreds. The next vital frontier he needed to breach was to be recognized as a Test cricketer of quality. Perth and Adelaide brought him that. A sensational run of performances lay in wait.

In every sense Kohli is the quintessential modern cricketer. He thrives in every format of the game. He is obsessed with training in the gym and muscle toning. He is supremely fit and athletic. For him, fielding well—lightning reflexes, acrobatic saves, swooping on and attacking the ball, throws that arrow in like guided missiles—is as important a part of the game as anything else. He puts a price on his wicket, willing to be patient, willing to hold back his effervescence till he is ready to uncork it.

Both his technique and temperament are sound. Against spinners, his footwork twinkles. ‘Kohli’s bat-swing, however, is not quite how the coaching manuals say it ought to be,’ former After Tendulkar. India opener and author Aakash Chopra has written. ‘He has a relatively short backlift, and an even shorter follow through. But he generates phenomenal bat speed by flicking his wrists at the point of contact, which in turn generates immense power.’

Kohli has said that he learned from watching Rafael Nadal the need for and importance of meticulous, almost ritualistic preparation. On court, Nadal lines up his water bottles alongside his chair in a particular way. Before each serve, comes a sequence of tics: a swipe of his forehead; a flick at a lock of hair; the bounce of the ball a certain number of times; the pulling of his shorts at the bum. Repetition instils a sense of structure, a feeling of calm amid the storm of emotions and incidents that swirl around the player at the top level of international sport.

Before facing each ball, Kohli goes into a long, slow wind-up. He twirls his bat, held between both gloved hands and pointing upwards, five, six times. It is like the twirl of a racket that a tennis player habitually does; only, while the racket is kept horizontal, parallel to the ground, Kohli’s bat is perpendicular to the ground. He then screws up his nose, turning his face into a grimace. With his thumb, he prods the visor of his helmet. Only after that does he settle into his stance. His eyes blaze with a brooding intensity. The tics are ungainly, agitated, but the shotmaking that follows is sumptuous.

There is no proper cricket shot that Kohli cannot play. Given his wristy dazzle, he prefers to play his shots on the leg side. His ‘bread and butter shot’, Sharma feels, ‘is the flick off his legs or hips’. But his cover drive is emphatic, imbued with poise, balance, superb transfer of weight, power and control. His pulls off the front foot—the bat coming down at just the right angle, slapping the ball down in front of square, or swivelling to tuck it away behind square—are joyously executed. On occasion, when he is really set and the shots are flowing, it seems as though the only way to get Kohli out is for Kohli to get himself out. ‘The one area in which he needs to improve is playing the cut shot against fast bowlers,’ Sharma told me.

The other area is working on changing the perception of the bad boy image. The perception has changed over the years—in part because Kohli’s play has been so scintillating, his batting has been so central to India’s performance. Besides, Kohli has matured compared to the teenager he was when he won the Under-19 World Cup. He is still unafraid to show his emotions on the field, but that in itself is no bad thing. It adds an edge of intensity and resolve to his play, an aggressiveness and show of intent that tells the opposition—however famed—that he means business and is not to be trifled with. Not crossing the line into petulant, brattish behaviour is what Kohli must watch out for, especially given the fact that it seems a matter of when rather than if that he becomes captain of India.

An excerpt from Soumya Bhattacharya's After Tendulkar. Reproduced with the permission of Aleph.