Where do we start about the few minutes of madness when Indians drove themselves crazy? Perhaps best to start with Virat Kohli, who should have known better. But first a word about the simplest possible bowling plan deployed against them by the Australians. Three slips, two gullies, a mid-off – men packed behind the stumps and large vacant spaces under the gaze of the batsmen. And the line of bowling well outside off stump. Surely, this can’t work, Indians aren’t that bad? Remarkably, India were 22 for 3 by lunch.
Was it their desire to show intent? Was it just the ego? Was it mental laxness? On social media, former batsman Sanjay Manjrekar would tweet about the role of the batting coach in the team. That’s a fair point in itself in the larger scheme of things with this batting unit, but one doesn’t need a coach to tell anyone, least of all Kohli, to go chasing wide deliveries. Or Shubman Gill for that matter.
It’s also been said that this 2024 series has a whiff of 2011 about it, in terms of how that Australian tour 13 years ago showed the decline of the aging legends like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman and Virender Sehwag. Unlike them, Kohli has hit a hundred on this tour, but even his ardent fans wouldn’t be cuing up its highlights and term it as one of special hundreds as it came against a tired attack looking to defend run-flood with spread-out field.
There is one other difference in relation to that 2011 tour – Kohli’s travails here can’t be compared with Tendulkar’s then. That one was a rather strange tour for Tendulkar who kept looking like a million bucks until the moment of error that would get him out. In contrast, Kohli hasn’t looked good, be it in Perth’s first innings or at Adelaide. It would remain a puzzle why Tendulkar kept getting out after looking good on that tour – unlike Dravid, say, who was sorted out by Ben Hilfenhaus and VVS Laxman. With Kohli, there is no puzzle to why he has been getting out.
The puzzle is how he has been doing it again and again. Off his first delivery, he went chasing and was lucky not to edge. So did Steve Smith, off his second ball, but he began correcting those mistakes – the lunge-and-chase stopped, then the flailing hands stopped. Not with Kohli. There was a brute of a delivery from Mitchell Starc that leapt almost from a length and went past Kohli’s gloves; there was no shame in getting out to that ball as there was no shame in Smith getting beaten by good deliveries in the first innings, particularly by Akash Deep.
But Kohli kept chasing like a man with a self-destructive streak. Perhaps the batting coach can genuinely question about what he was thinking to understand the headspace: was it a desire to show intent, was it to prove a point, was it a weird wish to counterattack tamely, was it somehow wishful thinking that a couple of fours, if he connected, would force Australians to change the field or line of attack?
Or is it a case of nerves and self-doubt masked by a pretence of confidence? Those are valid questions to understand for course-correction is needed.
It’s not as if he hasn’t been working hard at the nets. That he has. Rather intensely at that. Just like Steve Smith made a tweak by opening up his stance, Kohli was trying a different tact. He was pushing back furiously before pressing forward to play at the Brisbane nets. But time and again, he would be late on that forward movement, caught on the walk, almost. At the end of the nets, he would bang his bat with his second bat he was holding. On Monday, he had further tinkered with that tweak: the back movement wasn’t as back into the crease as it was at nets, and subsequently he didn’t have to strain as much to get forward. A little back, and then the opening of the left foot – but there was a visible stutter on that front foot, a slight jar of the balance that was discernible. A batting coach can, if he has the stature, aid in this perhaps. Not that Smith took any coach’s help; at this stage in career, he was doing his own thing, trying to find a way out. So did Kohli perhaps.
But the set-up is one thing, but the decision to chase a wide ball is another. Of course, the set-up does affect the success rate of that chase – but why chase this kind of a ball in the first place?
He also does another curious thing when he goes for the balls on the 6-7th stump. It seems there is an effort to play it through mid-off, perhaps to try to offer a full-bat face, but it’s a curious choice of shot. Not many, if any, can drive a ball from that wide through the V. Usually, the choice is to go squarer, like a Younis Khan or Nasser Hussain or the plethora of left-handers who do that. See the replay of his first ball or the one he got out, or a few dismissals in the past, Kohli makes that uncommon choice.
Uncommon times, common mistakes that repeat – Kohli vs Kohli is on. Which Kohli will win next time he comes to bat?
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