Minutes later he was still at it, still nodding his head, unable to reconcile the fact that he was dismissed cheaply, again, on the first ball after lunch. He threw the ball outside Marco Jansson’s ball and got off. again. He looked good at the crease in very tough batting conditions, then threw him against a race to play with poor shot selection. again.
The manner in which Kohli got out is now the biggest topic of discussion in Indian cricket but it appears that the champion batsman is unable to do anything about it.
Kohli’s 18 off 32 balls ended in the same innings as the first, with a loose waft off a ball at the fifth or sixth stump resulted in another lead. It was the same story in the first innings at Centurion. And also on a tour of England earlier this year.
Former captain even before Kohli’s dismissal Sunil Gavaskar Part of the morning session was spent on air discussing in detail about Kohli’s dismissal. Gavaskar explained, “He has a back-and-cross movement that is towards the off-stump and not the middle.” “And then the front foot goes to the off-stump as well. That’s why he insists on delivery. Of course, he has scored around 8000 Test runs in this manner.”
Former India Batting Coach Sanjay Bangari, who stressed on the need for Kohli to play his backfoot more often in the first innings, also took note of the issue. “In 2018 he wanted to practice on some seaming tracks in dewy conditions, to emulate the conditions in England.
“We drew an imaginary box and he tried not to take his hands out of the box. So he was playing close to his body, under his eyes. He would not make the mistake of taking his hands out of the box,” Bangar he said.
However, Kohli is back in old habits and patterns. “In his early years he was scoring a lot of runs on-side so bowlers started bowling fifth stump, sixth stump line. The kind of pitches he grew up on in Delhi has also made him a front foot player.
When the inevitable dismissal happened, Gavaskar looked shocked. “Look how far the ball is, he could well have left it alone. Because he is primarily a bottom-handed player, there is an angle in the bat that gets him out.”
Now the onus is on Kohli to come up with a remedy, as the bowlers have now woken up to this failure. At 33, India’s Test captain could be expected to be at the peak of batting form. Instead, his Test average has dropped below 30 over the past two years.
Kohli averages 19.33 in three Tests in 2020 and 28.21 in 11 Tests this year. His average has dropped to 50.34, the lowest in his career. He is now fourth in the list of worst performing Indian captains in a calendar year.
This is a cricketer who has reinvented himself time and again to score big. Maybe it’s time for another such tweak. As Gavaskar put it, “(Sometimes) you need to make small, tiny changes depending on the methods of your dismissal.”
,