Inside Out: What Virat Kohli, an ODI great, doesn't get about batting in T20s

Virat Kohli has been an undisputed king of limited-overs cricket over the last decade and all the stats about batting are stacked heavily in favour of his supremacy in international cricket.  But, with T20 being an always-evolving format, is Virat Kohli, the master of chasing and a template for young batsmen across the world on how to pace an innings, faltering on the lines of lack of dominance for the sake of reliability and consistency? Is he batting with the wrong approach in T20s and trying to be consistent and in the process of attaining that, becoming a liability for the team.

These questions started doing rounds again after India lost the final game of the three-match T20 series on Tuesday, 8 December at the SCG. Fans and pundits weighed in on the fact that despite Kohli staying till the 19th over India dropped the game with 12 runs to spare, albeit the hope was there till Kohli was batting in the middle. But, an honest look back on the middle phase of the game would hint that Kohli took a lot of time and left a lot to do for himself and Hardik Pandya in the last three-four overs.

Understand the context of Virat Kohli’s approach and the negative impact it carried onto the batting line up in the last game India lost. In the chase of 187, Kohli scored a 61-ball-85 and that left the team with only 51 balls to score remaining 102 runs and ultimately, India were defeated by 12 runs in Sydney. A 61-ball-85 does not look or sound a bad score or a bad strike rate but the impact of those 61 balls was telling on other batsmen such as Sanju Samson, Hardik Pandya and up to certain extent Kohli himself who was looking grumpy after missing balls he believed should have disappeared to give him and the team some impetus while the rate was surging higher and higher.

To be fair to Kohli, his hands were tied by regular fall off wickets at the other end but scoring a fifty off 41 balls while the team is in pursuit of 187 runs does not bode well for the batting might of someone as Kohli. Or maybe, it’s the might of his batting and the enormity of the value he puts on his wicket is not letting him bat freely in T20s. Kohli bounced back a bit better, scoring his next 35 runs in mere 20 balls with a strike rate of 175, but his lack of ‘intent’ that everyone else in his team is blamed for in case they lacked in a match, put a lot of pressure on other batsmen and resulted in wickets.

Another defence to Kohli’s batting approach in the last T20 could well be that Aussies bowled well to him and bowled with a specific plan and if he had gone out in quest of breaching those tactics, the visitors would have been in trouble anyway. But, Virat Kohli, would do well to take a leaf out of Brendon McCullum or Eoin Morgan’s book to understand that there are no marks for taking the game close or losing by a thin margin.

One does not need to go beyond his scoring pattern in the last game to understand what is plaguing Virat Kohli in the T20 format. Australian captain Aaron Finch introduced the spin twins of Adam Zampa and Mitchell Swepson from the seventh of India’s attempt of the chase and since that time India got only one four and that came off Dhawan’s bat while Virat could not hit a solitary boundary between a dismissive off-drive off Sean Abbott on the first ball of the sixth over and the last ball of the 14th over that too was bowled by Abbott. He was batting at 31 from 21 balls at the end of the sixth over while at the end of the 14th over, his score read 64 runs from 48 balls, implying that the Indian captain took as many as 27 balls to score his next 31 runs. That is as abysmal as it gets for the standards set by batsmen like his friends AB de Villiers and his deputy in limited-overs cricket for India, Rohit Sharma.

As stated earlier, Virat Kohli needs to understand there is no point scoring 80 odd runs and scoring 180 runs as a team when the flatness of the pitch allows batsmen to score as many as in excess of 200 runs. There will be no prize for either him and his team if they bat well and mount 180 odd runs with the loss of only two or three wickets and the opposition defeat them in the game of domination and aggressive batting approach.

Kohli has been a master of understanding and reacting to the frailties in his own game and he would do well if he can utilise the time to find a balance between an aggressive approach and what he is doing now. He needs to unlearn a bit of discipline and the substantivity he has brought in his batting after suffering very few loss of forms in his fairly long batting career.

Kohli needs to be realistic and weigh in his options while keeping in mind that he is no AB de Villiers or Rohit Sharma in terms of six-hitting or maybe even Jos Buttler purely in terms of ball-striking abilities to turn things around rapidly as they may have been able to do. Rohit too has been guilty of making slow starts in his innings, but he has always made sure that once he gets his eyes in, he starts making boundary lines smaller and smaller and similar is the case with AB de Villiers. 

Unlike those batsmen, Kohli’s game has not been built on ball-striking and that he relies on finding gaps and playing his natural strokes to get going even in T20s and those attributes don’t always work when the team needs 15 runs an over in a chase or as many as possible every over while setting up the total.

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