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Virat Kohli failed to find his lost touch in the recently concluded fifth and final Test against England at Edgbaston. Across the two innings, the star India batter managed to score 31 runs after he was dismissed for 11 and 20 in India's first and second essay respectively. While Virat Kohli played on a Matthew Potts delivery in the first innings, in the next, he received an unplayable ball from England captain Ben Stokes only to be caught in the slips by Joe Root. With his twin failures in Birmingham, Virat Kohli has now extended his barren run in international cricket to just about 960 days as his last century in any format of the game came back way back in November 2019 against Bangladesh in Kolkata. Though his critics have said that Virat Kohli has passed his prime, former England fast bowler Darren Gough has backed him to regain his mojo soon. Darren Gough is a self-confessed Virat Kohli fan and believes that it was just a matter of time before the Delhi-born batter would get going once again.
Till 2019, Virat Kohli was tipped to break Sachin Tendulkar's world record of scoring 100 tons in international cricket as he had already hit 70 hundreds by then. But the wait for his 71st three-figure score seemed to have become endless now.
Despite his 31-month lull, Virat Kohli has extraordinary numbers in ODIs, having struck 43 centuries in the 50-over format. Tendulkar, on the other hand, has 49 hundreds to his name in One-Day Internationals.
Though Virat Kohli's comparisons with Sachin Tendulkar have disappeared in recent days, Darren Gough revealed that when he first saw the current talisman of the Indian cricket team, he had compared him with the Little Master.
“When I first saw him playing in England, I thought, WOW… I thought Tendulkar was good. He was brilliant, a genius in fact, but this guy Virat Kohli is right up there with him. Amazing player, such style, aggression… everything I wanted to look for in a cricketer. He can take on the short ball, good against spin. He has got that arrogance, puts the cap on as well now and again,” Darren Gough told Cricket.com.
“I want him to get back scoring hundreds. We have seen Joe Root used to go through that spell – a lot of 70s, 80s and 90s. But I feel that with Virat, once he gets one, he would just keep going – hundred, hundred, hundred. And that’s what Joe Root has done. Virat is going though that spell and he just needs to score that first one and then he is going to cash in for the next 3-4 years,” Darren Gough added.
Meanwhile, former India captain Sunil Gavaskar claimed that Virat Kohli was unable to make a big score in the rescheduled Test at Edgbaston as he was trying to meet the ball as early as possible with the bat.
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Sunil Gavaskar mentioned that to succeed in English conditions, one needs to play the ball late and here Virat Kohli was making a big mistake as he was not allowing the deliveries to come to him.
“The trick to play in England is to play as late as possible. Then you are allowing the ball to do its bit and then you are playing the ball. From what little I saw in the highlights, it seemed Kohli was looking to reach for the ball, trying to play the ball early,” Sunil Gavaskar said on Sports Today.
“Therefore, he was not looking like he was in 2018 when he was looking to play it very late around the off-stump.”
“But the first mistake he is making is turning out to be his last mistake. Maybe he is not having the run of the luck at the moment. I think you obviously plan a little bit, visualize what the bowler is going to do the next day. Therefore, you can stay outside the crease but you can go with a pre-meditated plan of batting, which means the bowler has to bowl the same line you are expecting,” he added.
“If he doesn't bowl in those lines, you are in trouble. Cricket is always about instinctive action. And while you are giving yourself just that extra bit of preparation by trying to understand the bowler's strengths, at the end of the day, it's an instinctive game,” Sunil Gavaskar summed up.
Virat Kohli will be back in action on Thursday as Team India will face home favorites England in the first of the three T20Is in Southampton.
India Squad: Rohit Sharma (Captain), Ishan Kishan, Ruturaj Gaekwad, Sanju Samson, Suryakumar Yadav, Deepak Hooda, Rahul Tripathi, Dinesh Karthik (wk), Hardik Pandya, Venkatesh Iyer, Yuzvendra Chahal, Axar Patel, Ravi Bishnoi, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Harshal Patel, Avesh Khan, Arshdeep Singh, Umran Malik
