Readers Write In #805: The Unfinished Reign

By Sai Prasath

There are two kinds of greatness in sport. The first is the statistical kind, easy to spot and simple to quantify. It’s in the columns of centuries & in the averages (especially in the case of test cricket), and in the records broken. The second is the harder one: the kind that lives between the lines, the kind that’s felt, not measured. The greatness that makes you catch your breath mid-sentence, gasp at a crisp cover drive and makes your eyes well up for reasons you can’t fully explain.

Virat Kohli belonged to the second kind.

Yes, there were the numbers, plenty of them. A red-ball peak over a 5-years period that few sportsmen have managed to scale or even dream of. But that was never why I loved him. Not really. As with Federer’s single-handed backhand or Kamal Haasan twisting his moustache while his lips were drenched in communist red blood in Anbe Sivam, Kohli’s cover drive made me feel something divine. It was almost devotional.

There’s this theory I’ve long held, unscientific but stubborn. That the icons we fall for in sport, in cinema, in life operate on a certain frequency. And when you tune into the one whose signal mirrors your own, the connection is inexplicably profound. Like tuning into a song only you can hear. Like entering a place of worship and suddenly understanding, even if just for a moment, why people believe.

India and its obsession with the need to be humble, and its masses glorifying personalities who are soft-spoken and submissive, have always struck me as contradictory. We seem to have a love-hate relationship with anyone who displays character, edge, or unfiltered confidence, always waiting for them to trip, just to say “I told you so.” I see it in the way people compare Virat to MS, two opposite poles, fire and the ice; with MS’s stoicism often praised at the expense of Virat’s intensity. It reminds me of the way Tamil Nadu lionizes Rajnikanth for being humble and endearing, while brushing off Kamal as too intellectual or “full of himself,” despite the latter’s cinematic genius. I’ve always found the world more beautiful because of those who defy these conventions, who rebel when young, not out of vanity but out of passion. That’s what drew me to them. Federer, Kamal, and Kohli — all of them had moments of self-assured arrogance, moments when they publicly claimed their greatness. But they were also purists, in love with their own art, devoted to its discipline. Rebellion is often misunderstood as just the act of breaking rules. But to rebel and still hold sacred the core traditions of your craft, that contradiction is what fascinated me. That was the frequency I tuned into.

When I watch Kohli chase an improbable target with surgeon-like precision, Federer slice a drop on the run that defies gravity and simultaneously breaks the ankle of the opponent or Kamal shed tear from a single eye out of sheer will just because the director asked him to, I don’t just see mastery. I see them twitching with agony at mediocrity, their rage at the gap between ambition and reality. It all felt like home. Kohli, in his best and worst moments, made that frequency vibrate ferociously for me. His victories seemed personal.

He started out as a brat. In fact, all three of them did. Roger broke racquets and yelled at umpires. Kamal railed against the machinery of cinema, furious that the world didn’t see what he saw. And Kohli? He flipped the bird to the rowdy crowd at SCG. He mouthed off. And yet, as with the others, I couldn’t look away. Not because of the tantrums, but because buried under that fury was a fire for perfection so pure, so uncompromising, that it could consume them.

And it nearly did.

But what made Kohli’s arc more compelling, more cinematic than most, was the way he transformed that fire. He didn’t douse it, you don’t want your gods to become too domesticated, but he tempered it. In time, he learned to conduct it. The fury became focus. The snarling became celebration. The chip on the shoulder turned into a crown.

This wasn’t a cricketer simply winning games. This was an athlete willing an entire ecosystem into existence.

For all his white ball brilliance, and there were many nights where his blade seemed touched by divine intent; it’s Kohli the Test captain who will live longest in my memory. Not just the runs. Not just the results. But the revolution. The vision.

Before Kohli, India had produced great Test teams. But they were often defined by their batting – elegant, elaborate, but mostly fragile in foreign lands. Kohli changed the DNA. He looked at a generation of lean, hungry quicks — Shami, Bumrah, Ishant, Siraj — and demanded a hunting pack. He didn’t just back pace, he built it. His legacy isn’t just his hundreds, but the twenty wickets India started taking abroad. At Centurion, at the Oval, at Melbourne. He turned India into a team that didn’t just play overseas; we prowled.

And no memory encapsulates that era better for me than Lord’s, 2021. Not 1983, not 2002. That Test, the snarling, searing 60 overs of hell that humbled England and brought it down ot its knees was the crown jewel of King Kohli’s reign. The pace attack he envisioned, molded and unleashed on the world, finally laid siege to cricket’s most hallowed ground. It felt poetic. It felt just. It felt like a man being repaid for the sacrifices he made when no one else believed.

And yet, he didn’t get his fairytale ending.

The 2021 series hung in limbo, later denied its rightful conclusion. And Kohli, in perhaps the cruelest irony sport reserves for its most devoted soldiers, never captained India in a Test again. No final lap. No goodbye speech. Just an awkward, silent drift into the background. A captaincy taken, not surrendered. The game, as always, moving on before it says thank you.

Still, in my mind, the scoreline reads 2-1 India. Always will.

In some ways, it feels apt that he didn’t get the fairytale. Federer didn’t either. Kamal, for all his genius, still fights for the audience he deserves. Their art, like their ambition, is always unfinished.

What I found most compelling, in retrospect, is how Kohli, like the others I’ve deified, never asked to be loved. They asked to be understood. And when the understanding came, often late, they had already evolved into something gentler. Something greater.

I like to believe that it is not humility they found. It’s something more profound: perspective. Federer let go of the need to dominate while understanding the limitations with his game, some from injuries over the years, some technical and some mental (*cough* Djokovic *cough*). Kamal made peace with not being mainstream. Kohli traded the growl for a quiet grace, again with understanding of his own limitations. His retirement wasn’t met with fanfare. Just a strange, aching silence. As if the game itself wasn’t ready to let go.

I keep going back to that image: Kohli, suited and shaded, at Phil Hughes’ funeral, grief written across his face. A few days later, he took a Mitchell Johnson bouncer to the helmet and responded not with fear, but fire. Two centuries followed. Almost a win. A signal to the world. For me post that, he was no longer playing cricket. He was writing his myth as India’s Greatest Test Captain, which is now folklore.

Even now, when I think of him, it’s not the stats I see. It’s the conductor at the MCG, orchestrating the crowd like a symphony. It’s the madman sprinting across the field, igniting his teammates. It’s the boy with the bat, furious at the world, and then the man who shaped it.

To love Virat Kohli was to believe in intensity. In purpose. In the idea that talent alone was never enough. You had to sweat it, bleed it, live it. And in doing so, he didn’t just play Test cricket. As many have said, he became its fiercest evangelist.

And as one commenter on The Guardian wrote, “He was great at Test cricket, but more than most of the other greats, he was great for Test cricket. He came along exactly at the right moment for it, the person Test cricket needed the most.”

I couldn’t have summed it up any better.