Kohli should be more of a prick
Petulant, underachieving in the last three years, ranting and attenders of inappropriate Covid parties. There are some obvious, albeit tenuous, parallels that could be drawn between Britain's soon to be ex-prime minister and India's former cricket captain. Yet for all Kohli's faults there has always been one thing that distinguishes his bellicose behaviour from that of Boris Johnson's: he does it not for personal aggrandisement but for the good, at least in aim, of his side. Both men have, indisputably, transformed their countries in their respective spheres, a fact which can only serve to bolster their confidence-fuelled characters. Johnson's absolute lack of contrition after his falls grates on his enemies the same way Kohli's continued theatrics do on his. Both probably believe that if you have come this far with such a tactic, starting to be demure might seem even more absurd than carrying on in the same vein.
While Johnson remains very much a 360 egoist, for Kohli a sort of schizophrenia to how he acts has developed. There was, with good reason, much derision and joy at some of Kohli's Bairstow-baiting antics in the field during the Edgbaston Test. While this behaviour is either entertaining or shoddy depending on your view, what is absolutely incongruous is that Kohli doesn't any longer extend it to when he is actually batting. In the field he prowls around like a rottweiler that's had chilli powder rubbed on its balls, when he's batting it's like he's had them lopped off, both in how he carries himself and, to some extent, his actual lack of scoring intent. That he’s apparently content to let the disparity continue, even after three years of relative batting failure - and the plethora of fifties and his stellar career record mean it is very relative - is what is most blazingly apparent, beyond the tutting and sniggers it induces.
There have, of course, been a few tit-a-tits when he's batting - “this isn't your fucking backyard” he spat at a pitch running on Anderson last year - but what's noticeable about Kohli's determination to dominate the crease through force of personality is that he only does it when someone else is in occupation. The Maradonaesque image of him facing down the entire South African side came when he made his highest test score, 79, since his last hundred in 2019, but it is rare to see him with juices fully flowing with willow in hand. He might not have needed confrontation to feed off throughout his batting career, and it might be a futile policy to start now, but it's a weapon that he doesn't even consider as part of his armoury. Natural, you might say, for any player out of form, but we're talking about Virat Kohli here, for whom personality once seemed permanent.
Because how things pan out now is just awkward. When Kohli himself is batting, a sort of embarrassed, expectant hum descends, with neither he nor opponents that willing to engage in any of the verbal melodramas seen when he's fielding. It's weird. He's made plenty of faux or otherwise enemies in England's side but none of them were willing to splay him with invective in either the Tests or ODIs, perhaps because they know he's in such a weird funk he should just be left to potter around until the inevitable prod and gone arrives. But possibly because it almost seems rude to sledge someone so placid and damned by inevitability. In the final ODI he jittered around the crease looking simply nervous. Kohli, Virat Kohli, was nervous, for heaven's sake. You could see it in his twitchy eyes, a fact more pronounced by the fact they still simmer with aggression when he's fielding. It’s horrible just watching him live by the sword at slip and die by the whimper to it.
There are other disparities relevant, one between the way England’s players laud their new coach for the clarity of his approach and the way McCullum himself poured scorn on the very term Bazball. That’s perfectly understandable. No coach wants to spend their time slaving away identifying nuances and then be labelled as Barry Fry rather than Carlo Ancelloti. Another is how the seemingly blasé genius of players such as Kohli, Pietersen and Tendulkar is revealed in biographies and Sky Masterclasses as actually being rooted in the obsessively analytical rather than the merely instinctive. The idea Kohli could restore his mojo simply by flicking a switch marked with the cricketing equivalent of "get into them' must seem anathema to a player of his cerebral magnitude, but Kohli is no longer a presence at the crease, except a rather ghostly one. Notwithstanding the anointment of McCullum as infallible guru may be a little early, it would be fascinating to know what bullish words he would whisper in Virat’s ear were he overseeing such a collapse of batting confidence.
Babar Azam sent a tweet of support to Kohli recently, which Kohli replied to with magnanimity. Well, that's lovely in itself but Kohli was very much bat in hand when he responded. Imagine if Azam had said it while batting to Kohli the fielder. Pakistan's well-meaning, but in some respects overreaching captain, would have been told to, frankly, fuck off. That obviously would have been a slightly punchy response on Twitter but Kohli’s meek thanks to Azam was a bit galling. There is little pleasure seeing him live out whatever remains of his international career as some sort of matinee villain that vents his spleen at batsman whilst accepting patronising sympathy bouquets for his own efforts on social media. It’s all wrong.
If he goes out in continuing failure, at least let it be him spitting from the crease not merely at it. Kohli the fielder remains a glorious, albeit increasingly tragicomic, force of will. Stokes’ ball to him at Edgbaston was freakish, but it was propelled by personality at a batsman who has entirely forgotten his own when he puts on his pads. Kohli is the greatest sporting prick it has been privilege to ever watch. Being so in only one half of his game is, far beyond any of his fielding hysterics, the absolute worst thing to witness.