The other day Sourav Ganguly said in an interview that Virat Kohli wouldn’t be measured only by the runs he scores. Ganguly is partially right. Kohli has reached a level where one success or failure won’t be the yardstick for measuring his greatness, but there’s something about this England tour that would make Kohli a little more worried than usual.
For years, we have come to believe that unless a batsman has done well in England, his CV is not complete. The fact that Kohli managed only 134 runs from 10 innings in 2014 and put a serious question mark over his ability against the moving ball and that is one area the Indian captain would like to address. He had elaborate plans for his England preparation when he signed up for a county stint with Surrey, only to back out citing an injury.
Post IPL, he said he needed rest, something that didn’t go down too well with the Surrey management. “Virat has played only a limited number of (Test) matches in England and his record is nowhere near the high quality he has achieved everywhere else,” former England captain Alec Stewart quipped after Kohli decided to give the stint a miss.
The right-hander, who has been superb across formats, isn’t going into this series underprepared, though. The ODIs and the T20s preceded the Tests and Kohli has got the time to acclimatize himself to conditions.
But of course, Test cricket will pose a different set of challenges. The red Duke ball will swing a bit more and James Anderson will come into the picture. The paceman was having Kohli for breakfast, lunch and dinner in 2014 and when Kohli returned the compliment in India last year with the bat, the Englishman wasn’t too charitable with his “we don’t know how good he is in England” comments. Kohli, for one, doesn’t forget taunts. While he is surely charging his batteries to give it back to Anderson, the paceman didn’t mind a few mind-games of his own. “It doesn’t matter if he gets runs or not? I think he is telling lies there,” Anderson said a couple of days back, trying to put a little bit of pressure on the Indian captain.
But Kohli is at a stage of his career where these mind- games probably won’t affect him much. What would bother him more probably is the fact that he was getting out on one of his favourite shots, the cover drive, time and again, last time around. What looks a simple half-volley on pitches without lateral movement suddenly turns into a spitting cobra on a damp English surface, and that’s what Kohli has to guard against.
He will need to leave more deliveries, something that he is not too used to doing, and maybe let the ball come to him rather than go for it. Rahul Dravid’s magnificent batting performances in 2011 in England could possibly be the best coaching manual available for Kohli. The meticulous cricketer that the Indian captain is, it would be a surprise if he hasn’t gone through those knocks already. And once the red ball rolls, we may just see the same Kohli – who has ruled with the bat in places like South Africa and Australia – go past his final frontier, England.
The first Test of the five-match series starts at Birmingham on Wednesday (August 1)
-Times of India