Virat Kohli: Belligerence personified

It was the Indian skipper Saurav Ganguly who took the Indian cricket team to a new attitude of demonstrative belligerence. But while Mahendra Singh Dhoni remained cool and showed the belligerence only through his vulpine tactics and explosive batting, India’s latest captain, Virat Kohli’s propensity has been one of ‘an eye for an eye, if not more’. However, it will not be out of place to name the now defamed Lalit Modi as the one who, through the Indian Premier League and his exceptional organizing ability, actually brought the rest of the cricketing world down to its knees while simultaneously instilling a combative spirit among the Indian players to settle for nothing less than a win.

So in a sense, Virat is fortunate to have emerged as a sensational batsman in an era that has granted an impetus to his belligerent attitude while India has been fortunate to find just the right leader to lead its team of competitive cricketers. With his batting prowess, while Virat on the one hand has made cricket fans stop talking about Sachin Tendulkar, on the other hand, with his rather hostile leadership, he has made them forget the cool Dhoni leadership, too. Four individual double centuries against four successive opponents in Tests and seven successive series victories have put Virat on an insurmountable pedestal. In the first instance, I have purposely chosen to write four successive opponents instead of four successive series since my knowledge of Mathematics as well as English both belie me from referring to a single number as a series as was the case of an one-off Test against Bangladesh. In fact, the same logic needs to be extended when talking of the seven series victories and we ought to say against seven successive opponents.

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