Virat Kohli, India and cricket are being muscled out of T20 by new-age big-hitters

There was a time when Virat Kohli was the proud owner of that rare all-format batting template. Tests to ODI to T20 and back – he would change his jersey and gears but he was always Kohli. A child of the 90s, he had seen Sachin Tendulkar for far too long to give up on correctness. The celebrated Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh would sum up Kohli’s commitment to cricket’s ethos with an iconic line: “Much as the marketers would love to take cricket out of T20, Kohli keeps putting it back in.”

Finally, it seems Kohli’s long resistance is waning. This isn’t about the batting great’s deficiencies as a T20 batsman, more about cricket’s slow walk towards the exit in the game’s shortest format. A proof of these tumultuous transitional times is this puzzling contraction that is floating around this IPL. Despite being the highest run-getter for the first-half of season’s IPL, questions are being asked about Kohli’s place in the Indian side for the World T20.

For most of this month a bunch of batting buccaneers – Travis Head, Heinrich Klaasen, Jos Buttler – have been making the Indians aware that while they were busy in the deification of their batting Gods, the T20 format tumbled far away from the tree it fell from. They are the disruptors. They are normalising taboos, they are also making Kohli look inadequate.

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It will be unfair to single out Kohli, because there is no Indian batsman currently, including Rohit Sharma, who can pull off a power-hitting bludgeon a la Head or Klaasen, going bonkers.

Royal Challengers Bengaluru batter Virat Kohli reacts after his dismissal during the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 cricket match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad, at M Chinnaswamy stadium in Bengaluru, Monday, April 15, 2024. (PTI Photo) Royal Challengers Bengaluru batter Virat Kohli reacts after his dismissal during the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 cricket match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad, at M Chinnaswamy stadium in Bengaluru, Monday, April 15, 2024. (PTI Photo)

Carrying the bat through was once a virtue for an opener. Keeping wickets in hand for an all-out assault later was a time-tested white-ball tactic. Coaches and commentators insisted on rotating the strike, converting ones into twos. Run-making graphs were supposed to be inverted bells – fast-slow-fast. All that seems archaic, so 90s.

The other day, Kohli ticked all those ODI boxes. He played a classic white-ball inning against Rajasthan Royals. Starting as an opener, he remained unbeaten on 113 (72 balls, Strike Rate 156). He helped RCB reach 183/3. Rajat Patidar and Dinesh Karthik didn’t get a chance to bat.

Batting first, opener remaining not out, specialist hitter not getting a chance and team failing to reach par score – this is a fatal sequence in modern-day T20. RCB would pay for it. RR would canter to a win. Kohli should have read the winds of change. With 7 wickets in hand, he could have thrown caution to the winds.

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With bowlers becoming increasingly irrelevant to T20s, the only fool-proof plan that works is to bat out the rivals. Sun Risers Hyderabad (SRH) this season have cracked the maths of setting up a tall score. Head and Klaasen are the masterminds. The two foreigners think like high-rollers at a casino but are meticulous in the planning.

Against RCB, SRH scored IPL’s highest total of 287. Head doesn’t carry ODI baggage to T20 games. Fully aware that this was a format where 11 players get to share 20 overs, he seems to have a death wish after he has survived the first power play.

Royal Challengers Bengaluru player Virat Kohli at a warm-up session before the start of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 cricket match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad , at M Chinnaswamy stadium in Bengaluru, Monday, April 15, 2024. (PTI Photo)

In the 12th over he hit 4 fours to get to his 100 and the next over he was out, caught on the fence attempting another six. He got 102 from 41 balls, much faster than Kohli’s 72-ball 113. In the middle-overs, Kohli had gone into ODI mode. He was doing what Tendulkar would do in the 90s – milk singles in the 25 to 40 overs. He hit just one six in the 10 to 15 overs bracket.

Meanwhile, Klaasen’s T20 approach is far more evolved than even Head. After the game against RCB, Klaasen said he hardly jogs for 40 meters and his gym training too is limited. His training regime is in contrast to Kohli’s.

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Klaasen’s training methods are utilitarian. Bat swing and mental peace – are his two primary worries. To optimise his swing, the South African looks to baseball. T20 coaches these days are busy peeling the layers of cricket to strip it down to its basic core. They have understood that it all boils down to the swinging bat, middling the ball to send it over the fence. This simple pursuit has seen T20 cricket move closer to baseball – the far more scientifically analysed sport. That is why out-of-box thinking coaches like Julian Wood are seen in dugouts of national teams and franchise sides.

IPL 2024 IPL 2024 Orange Cap : Heinrich Klaasen moved to the third spot on Tuesday. (BCCI)

Wood calls himself a power-hitting coach. The home page on his website has these lines: “Having spent plenty of time in the USA observing the training methods and biomechanics associated with baseball, Julian has devised his own patented, cricket-specific training programme ..” He sounds very different from India’s batting coach Vikram Rathore and Virat’s mentor since childhood Rajkumar Sharma.

This Kohli vs Klaasen ideological batting duel is another of the many old vs new tugs of war that are part of every churn. The grip of the traditionalists might be loosening but they are still in the game. In about a month’s time, the World T20 will kick off in the US. The marketers and the buccaneers will be aligning to announce T20’s independence from cricket, declare it a republic where the traditionalists will look like outsiders. Here’s hoping Kohli rotates strike, converts ones into twos, keeps wickets in hands and, as only Ravi Shastri says, finishes it off in style. All for the sake of cricket.

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