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The end was muted. No fist pump, no scowl, no curse. No bat up or head down, no slow walk or standing crowd. A fighting man left Test cricket gently with an Instagram post that had a trace of poetry. He wrote of “the quiet grind, the long days, the small moments” of Test matches and there was something wistful to it all. Goodbye, Charlie Brown said, “always makes my throat hurt”.
Virat Kohli has left Test cricket, a format he blew life into like a man stoking an unsteady fire. He was hardly a single-handed saviour, but with 272 million Instagram followers, and an inexhaustible spirit, he was its most persuasive evangelist. In India, once, the host broadcaster always had a camera following him.
Kohli finished with 9,230 Test runs and they were substantial. Not more than others (he makes the all-time top 20), nor the most elegant, yet each one dipped in some brew of intensity and ferocity. He brought such heat to the game you feared he might self-combust.
Retirements – he still plays one-day cricket – are sentimental occasions. We measure an athlete one last time, place him in history, use flattery to camouflage his flaws and walk back in time with him to when we were both younger. We are not just remembering their lives but ours. A grand waltz is over and it feels mournful.
The exceptional athlete exerts a unique pull, offering a quality which lures us to the arena. Like Michael Jordan’s flight, or Cristiano Ronaldo’s swagger, or Simone Biles’ explosiveness. With Kohli, for this writer, it was his competitiveness.
Kohli could start a scrap in a nunnery. He wasn’t thin-skinned, he appeared to have none. Raw energy flowed from him. Once chubby, later slim, he seemed as unyielding as rebar. With him 100 per cent wasn’t a goal, it became a non-negotiable lifestyle. His teammates felt it, his rival smelled it, his audience was reassured by it. Across five days of Test cricket, this devotion elevated everyone, not least the game.
We understand competitiveness, this desire to outdo the next man, because we’re frequent witnesses to it. With some athletes it’s naked (Rafael Nadal), with others disguised (Lionel Messi). With Kohli you didn’t need to know cricket to see it. It was his body’s only language.
He was a study in defiance, a portrait in aggressiveness, making you think of electric currents and welterweight boxers. Always alert, gesticulating, celebrating, urging, snarling. Always alive. Always unrepentant. Always fearless. Always involved. Always turning heads, turning the temperature up, turning his teammates into better versions of themselves.
Most days – in his prime between 2014 and 2019 he scored 22 of 30 Test centuries – Kohli was irresistible. Some days he was insufferable. Swearing, mocking a crowd, shouldering a rival. A cactus of a competitor. And yet he would direct fans not to boo Australia’s Steve Smith and supported Mohammed Shami when the Indian player was trolled on social media. “To me,” he said, “attacking someone over their religion is the most pathetic thing that a human being can do.”
Athletes are paradoxes, emotional, calm, certain, insecure, egoistical, curious, all this as they play in stadiums where pressure must feel like a noose. No wonder they tell themselves, “breathe, breathe”. Kohli had the superior athlete’s serenity, able at the moment of the contest to narrow his life down to the corridor of the pitch and the bowler. Still, sure, single-minded. And humble. When he returned chastised from England in 2014, it is said he asked Sachin Tendulkar to examine his technique.
Thomas Babington Macaulay in his poem Horatius At The Bridge about the heroic Roman soldier, wrote: “And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds.” Kohli, in sporting terms, hailed from this tribe. Challenge provoked him, the contest elevated him. If Australia was the hardest land, then he would conquer it. In 18 Tests on those testy shores he scored seven hundreds.
His physical well-being influenced his mental form. To be fit was to be ready for what he craved. Combat. Fitness became his religion, self-discipline his armour, treating his body with Djokovic-ian care. He’d track his diet, sleep, fat percentage. He’d do Olympic lifts. He was a Caesar with the lean hungriness of a Cassius, sprinting singles as if each one might be his last.
My favourite story concerns the chicken burger. Kohli for years never had cheat days, only occasional cheat meals. When the burger came in 2016 after his 235 (340 balls, 515 minutes) in Mumbai against England, he couldn’t help himself. He ate only one half of the bun. There is a piousness to greatness.
Test cricket is the game’s most demanding form, a slow, studied game in a fast time which requires its finest practitioners to sustain it. And this is who Kohli was, a serious missionary, whose innings were like campaigns, calling us to this art form. Now he leaves, as grateful to the game as we are to him. He gave everything, all the time, for so long, to this game played in white. For a while cricket will feel colourless.
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