Revisiting Kohli's Test journey: A lengthy season offers the opportunity for a rewrite of his script

Kolkata: Virat Kohli has been out of Test cricket for over nine months now. The wait has been even longer at home, with his last Test being in March 2023. Despite this break, Kohli has achieved significant success in other formats of the game. He was a key player in the T20 World Cup winning team, emerged as the top scorer in the 2023 ODI World Cup, and had his best IPL season since 2016.

So, will the Bangladesh series, which begins on September 19, be a stepping stone to something bigger? Perhaps a Test high that the 37-year-old Kohli was always backed to regain but somehow hasn’t come together?

Churning runs at will before slipping through the gaps into a two-year dip, only to emerge out of it when hope was almost lost—Kohli’s career curve has taken on a mythical sheen by now. But the returns weren’t as great as they used to be. Not just the record slump in scoring hundreds, we are talking a near-halving of the home batting average from 77.1 in 2015-2019 to 34.5 since 2020 and a considerable slashing of strike rate (66.5 to 49.5).

It’s not as if Kohli alone has been affected, but it’s also true nobody else’s numbers have taken a hit on all fronts like him. Like Rohit Sharma, whose home average has dipped from 74.1 to 44.9 but has kept his strike rate over 60. Same with KL Rahul who has managed to hold a strike rate of above 50 despite seeing his average fall from 44.3 to 29.2. Only Rishabh Pant’s strike rate has grown from 84.4 to a staggering 95.8 even though his average has settled to a saner 56.9 from 92.

A major reason the conversation continues to steer itself towards Kohli’s form is because everyone knows what he is capable of. He can show the younger batters the way. And at home, part of that is being adept against spin bowling. Now, that didn’t seem to be a problem during 2015-19, when Kohli was on a spree with India winning every Test at home under his captaincy in their surefooted ascent to the top of the ICC rankings. Back then, he was averaging 76.3 against off spin and 126.8 against left-arm spin between 2015-2019. Since 2020, that has dropped to 34.8 and 25.1 respectively.

India have often found themselves boxed in on all sides by spinners since the tour of England in 2021. Before that series, India’s top-five averaged 64.1 against spin bowling at home. Since then, it’s been 36.8.

But Kohli’s downturn in specific has had other cascading effects. In the five years before the pandemic, Kohli had crossed the fifty-run mark 14 times (out of 40 innings) at home and converted 10 of them into hundreds. That had plummeted to three times (out of 17 innings) post 2020, out of which one was a hundred. To be sure, the pitches haven’t been easy to bat on and that has only added to his troubles.

As a partner too, Kohli’s support had diminished significantly. Till 2019, 14 partnerships of century or more runs had Kohli as one of the contributors. That came down to just one—with Axar Patel against Australia in Ahmedabad in 2023—since 2020.

These are telling numbers, more so in the light of India adopting a different batting approach after quietly phasing out Cheteshwar Pujara. Which essentially left Kohli to do the heavy lifting with Rohit Sharma, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer setting the pace. It’s a role the best batter of every team is expected to graduate to towards the twilight of the career, especially if he’s from the subcontinent.

It’s not easy to put a finger on what ailed Kohli back then but given how he has remastered the other formats in this intervening time, there’s no reason to believe Kohli isn’t ready to rewrite the Test script too.

And that’s important from India’s point of view since this is set to be an instructive season of Test cricket on many counts. As the push for another Test Championship summit clash is set to be given a boost at home, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill will get more opportunities to establish themselves in the top order while Kohli and Sharma prepare for the final leg of their Test career. And if Australia is at all meant to be the beginning of the end, Kohli has in these five home Tests a great platform to carve out a memorable final flourish.