Virat Kohli Trailblazing With Glory

With double centuries on Kohli’s diet since July, England had to take their chances early if they were to nip Kohli’s ambition in the bud...

- Sreelata S. Yellamrazu

There would be no early Christmas cheer for England. Virat Kohli made sure of that. With one Test still to go in the home series against England, India’s Test skipper continued to do what he has done right through this season, scoring double Test centuries in emphatic fashion and ensuring the balance of the game remained tipped in India’s favour. Kohli’s matured, measured innings in quick succession are ominous as they are impressive as India continue to ride their winning streak in the five day format.

There is something to be said of a batsman with a fearsome reputation to rip into a bowler. Then there is the other more subtly intimidating aspect of a batsman who stays grounded to his crease, uses his orthodox learning to entrench himself and cometh the hour, pulls off an unsuspecting coup right under the opposition’s nose before the latter can even catch a whiff of it. Virat Kohli has most dramatically and rapidly transitioned from the former to the latter, a trend that makes him arguably one of the rarest of dangerous cricketers of the modern era to be playing the game’s most traditional format.

Not often can it be said, particularly in a lengthy Test series such as the ongoing five Test series between India and England, that the fate of the series was decided indubitably by the bat of the team’s premier batsman. With India needing to at least draw the series to regain lost glory, Kohli did one better to ensure that there would be only one firm, outright winner of this series spectacle in India’s winter, much like he has done in his twenty-one Test old captaincy career, scoring a double century away from home in the West Indies and then bringing another one home against New Zealand as a warm up to the attritional series against England.