Kohli — the good, the bad and the ugly Premium

Virat Kohli: India's fittest, most successful captain, loved and hated in Australia, known for his intensity and passion.

Virat Kohli is a man of many parts. A fantastic batter. An extraordinary athlete. The fittest man in the Indian team for the last decade, even though he recently celebrated his 36th birthday. Proud, passionate, intense. An almost senior statesman, who is in his 17th year in international cricket. Statistically India’s most successful captain, even though the team didn’t win a single major title under his watch.

Kohli is also a scrapper, a streetfighter, someone who takes offence easily even where none is intended. He is private and guards his privacy zealously, is particularly sensitive when it comes to his young family, yet very vocal, very visible, very in-your-face on the cricket field. Perhaps, as they say, you can take the boy out of Delhi, but you can’t take Delhi out of the boy.

In Australia, they have learned to love Kohli. Oh, make no mistake, some sections love to hate him, but the majority loves to love him. That wasn’t always the case. On his first senior tour Down Under in 2011-12, he flipped a retaliatory bird at an abusive Sydney crowd in his first Test in Australia, a gesture that earned him the match officials’ wrath and a 50% fine of his match fee, slapped by match referee Ranjan Madugalle.

Kohli’s next foray to the batting crease, in the same Test, yielded only nine, but it wasn’t long before he started the earn the respect, if not the affection, of Australian crowds. In the next game on the famous WACA strip in Perth, he made 44 and 75 and finished off the Test leg with 116 (his maiden Test ton) and 22 in the last game in Adelaide. The triangular series that followed saw Kohli in sublime touch, his extraordinary unbeaten 133 off just 86 deliveries in a knock where he treated Lasith Malinga with absolute disdain striking a chord in the Australian fan.

It was on his following Test tour, in 2014-15, that Kohli made it impossible for the Aussies not to like him. He responded to Mitchell Johnson’s instinctive throw on his follow-through that struck him on the body, and a blow to the helmet from the same bowler, to uncork centuries in his first two innings as stand-in captain. By the time he finished the four-Test series as the full-time captain in the aftermath of Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s shock retirement, he had stacked up four centuries, done so with flair and authority and panache and a certain arrogance that the Australians identified with. He had suddenly become the most non-Aussie Aussie, if that makes sense. Virat Kohli was now one of their own, even if he wasn’t exactly their own.

That didn’t mean they didn’t heckle him or needle him. They realised that Kohli could rise to the bait, that he didn’t take kindly to being targeted and barracked. Kohli didn’t disappoint; he interacted and alternated between snarling and charming, taking over the role of the conductor of the crowd orchestra even from his position in the slip cordon, egging on the sizeable Indian section and completely disregarding the majority Australian presence.

Kohli locked horns with Steve Smith on Australia’s tour of India in 2017, stopping short of calling him a cheat when the Aussie skipper briefly looked in the direction of the dressing room during the Bengaluru Test, as if seeking clues on whether he should opt for the DRS challenge upon being adjudged leg before. By the end of that fractious tour, Kohli had all but severed links with all Aussie players – it didn’t help that Glenn Maxwell mocked the shoulder injury that kept Kohli out of the series decider in Dharamshala.