Virat Kohli, white-ball cricket, and the sun that doesn’t give way to darkness
At around 6 PM, the radiant sunshine slowly begins to give way to darkness. That is exactly how it feels while watching the fag end of great sporting careers. The coruscating candlelight gradually begins to dim; an indicator that it is time to pen a few words on a glorious chapter. Virat Kohli, one of the greatest Indian cricketers, has retired from the longest format alongside T20Is. But in the world of IPL and ODI cricket, the willow is still burning bright, bisecting gaps with incandescent brilliance.
On a day when inclement weather threatened to play spoilsport in Raipur, a few of his imperious shots against Kolkata Knight Riders would have brought smiles to the faces of the patient crowd. Kohli’s quintessential hundred, while chasing down a target, would have transported aficionados to another era. Meanwhile, analysts may well have been engaged in a bit of number-crunching over his upgraded spin game.
Among all those eye-popping strokes, we need to delve deeper into his skill set against spin. Around three to four years ago, there were enough whispers about how his game against left-arm spin and leg-spin had stagnated – and perhaps rightly so. But in Raipur, he used the depth of the crease to pull Anukul Roy and Sunil Narine. He then manufactured a touch of room to loft Anukul, the left-arm spinner, straight down the ground.
Even in the 2025 IPL, Kohli was reluctant to take the down-the-ground route against left-arm spin. Incidentally, during practice sessions before RCB’s game against Chennai Super Kings, he was constantly attempting to loft left-arm spinners over extra cover and down the ground. All the hard yards in his own training workshop now seem to be yielding rewards.
To gauge Kohli’s game against pace, we have to revisit the RCB-GT encounter at the Chinnaswamy Stadium. As always, GT had a battery of tall fast bowlers. It made one ponder over Kohli’s scoring areas, as in the recent past he has looked restricted in tailoring gaps against hard lengths via square and behind square on the off side. There is even a theory that one of the reasons which hastened Kohli’s Test retirement was his inability to pepper the aforesaid areas with boundaries.
However, on that particular day at the Chinnaswamy, Kohli crunched a couple of boundaries that encapsulated the essence of his continuous improvement. Kohli was not just prepared to play on the rise, but also took on a short delivery from Prasidh Krishna that seemed to get big on him, carving it through backward point.
While sitting in the press box, this correspondent couldn’t help but wonder: why didn’t Kohli try to play that way during the last few years of his Test career? On second thoughts, perhaps we need to move on from writing about the decline of his Test game, as he seems happily retired from that format. Instead, the focus should be on how Kohli has found a successful second wind in an already glittering career in the shorter formats.
In the abridged versions of the game, the sun never seems to set on Kohli. Perhaps his white-ball game is akin to the Land of the Midnight Sun — Norway — where the sun simply doesn’t seem to set.
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