Leave Kohli alone, he will find his way back into form and runs

Kohli is going through a bad patch as sportsmen do and calls for his head are premature, ungenerous, and makes no cricketing sense

Do great batsmen demand — and require — greater understanding, and more time to find their form than the journeyman? It is a question that sometimes divides a nation, as it did India when Sachin Tendulkar was nearing the end of his career. And now it is happening with Virat Kohli.

Perhaps it is our national obsession with individual centuries that is part of the reason. That 100th international century kept eluding Tendulkar for weeks and months before he put a nation out of its misery by scoring one in Bangladesh. Tellingly, it came in a match that India lost. But no one seemed to notice. Individual success trumped team failure.

Kohli is going through a bad patch as sportsmen do, but calls for his head are premature, ungenerous and frankly makes no cricketing sense.

In sport, a break in continuity doesn’t mean the end. It takes just one big innings, perhaps his 71st international century (to satisfy something in our national psyche), and everybody will be wondering what the fuss was all about.

Watching Kohli in England in 2022 was only statistically like watching him in England in 2014. On that occasion, James Anderson had worked him out, finding either edge of his bat outside the off stump ensuring a highest of only 39 in ten Test innings. Kohli got out while looking like getting out.

This time it has been different. He has got out even as he has looked to be getting into his stride. Then, with a rare combination of diffidence and brashness, he would play away from his body and edge the ball. The self-doubt was of a man who has not made an international century in two and a half years, the assurance of one who has hit 70 of them around the world.

As India’s most successful captain and one of their three greatest batsmen (Sunil Gavaskar and Tendulkar being the other two), Kohli’s legacy is secure. His bad patch (measured only in terms of centuries scored) has lasted two and a half years. Yet even in that dark phase, he has scored over 2500 runs in 79 innings across formats with an average of 35.5, which is just under Chris Gayle’s career average and higher than that of Sanath Jayasuriya, Yuvraj Singh and Jos Buttler. That should give us a perspective.