Virat Kohli wasn’t dismissed fishing outside the off-stump at the Adelaide Oval on Thursday but to overcome this age-old weakness he made himself an LBW candidate. The cure, in this case, has the potential to be as bad as the disease.
Kohli was dismissed for a four-ball duck after he was trapped LBW by seamer Xavier Bartlett. To curb his tendency to chase the ball outside the off-stump, Kohli changed his guard, something he has done in the past with limited success.
Kohli started with a middle and leg-stump guard. It meant when the bowler ran in, only the off-stump and a bit of middle-stump was visible. And by the time, the Bartlett neared the crease, he would move further towards the off-stump and covering the entire line of stumps.
He now had his head in the line of off-stump. This seemed like a workable plan. Anything outside the eye-line, he would leave alone thus negating the away going deliveries. However, the LBW dismissal came into play if Kohli missed an in-coming ball or one in line with the stumps.
So here’s what happened during Kohli’s brief innings on Thursday.
To the first ball he faced, which was outside off-stump, he just let it go to the keeper. For the second ball it was a repeat of the first. Off the third, which was slightly closer than the previous two deliveries, he defended off the front-foot. By now, you could see how the delivery that goes away was playing on the back of his mind. In the past Vernon Philander, James Anderson, Stuart Broad have all ended up exposing Kohli’s technique.
And Bartlett took a leaf from the same playbook. The fourth delivery, like the previous three, landed outside off, but this one nipped back in sharply and as Kohli tried to flick it and ended up missing it altogether, there was only one end result as the ball hit the front pad: LBW. The umpire’s index finger went up in no time, giving Kohli his second duck in successive matches – first time it has happened for him in ODIs. It was also the fifth time in 11 innings where he has dismissed LBW.
In 2021, when the problem outside off-stump came up in England, he took a virtual off-middle guard. But then too, like now, he had to watch out for the LBW dismissal.
Kohli was repeatedly exposed while playing away from the body in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy last year. In the twilight of his career, with his place in the ODI team spot on the line, Kohli’s Achilles’ Heel continues to be a talking point.
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