Red-ball Renaissance Man!

December 2014.

MS Dhoni walked off quietly and left the cricket world stunned. Retiring from Test cricket, mid-series. Fans were shocked, but not entirely surprised. Overseas whitewashes, defensive cricket, India tumbling down the ICC rankings.

Enter Virat Kohli. The skipper.

No one ever questioned Kohli the cricketer. Confident, skilled, ice-in-veins under pressure. His success as a Test batter was a given.

But a leader par excellence?

That wasn’t a given. Virat Kohli didn’t just answer questions, he rewrote the script to become India’s best-ever red-ball skipper. He redefined what leadership meant in whites.

In the grand theatre of Indian cricket, only a few dared challenge traditions like Virat Kohli did. Even fewer came out victorious. Kohli did. As captain, he changed how India trained, played, and behaved. He didn’t inherit a legacy. So he built a new one from scratch. A hungry pack of wolves. Ruthless under any conditions. He, himself, led with a snarl, with clenched fists and bloodshot eyes that saw nothing but victory.

But behind all the chest-thumping drama…there was love. A deep, uncompromising love for Test cricket. Nobody in the modern era loved Test cricket more than Kohli. A format that many were happy to let fade away slowly, he made it his personal mission to resurrect.

Kohli gave the format a new heartbeat, a pulse, and a raw edge. He unleashed his Team India in whites! One fiery glare, one pumped fist, one sprinting celebration at a time. Every session felt like an event. Every wicket, a seismic shift.

But his boldest, and era-defining act of captaincy was one that few dared to dream: he made fast bowling fashionable in a country obsessed with dust bowls and turning tracks. He forged a fast-bowling cartel that didn’t just compete with the best; it struck fear and hunted them down in their own backyards. Jasprit Bumrah rattled helmets at the MCG, Mohammad Shami blasted through batting orders at Lord’s, while Ishant Sharma and Umesh Yadav owned Johannesburg like it was Delhi’s Kotla.

It took a toll on his batting. The centuries dried up, the fluidity dimmed. It’s hard to say he underachieved. Over 9,000 Test runs, 30 hundreds, countless match-defining knocks, but the aura and invincibility wore thin. Greatness wasn’t just possible with him; it felt inevitable. The fact that he didn’t end up with 10K Test runs, 50 Test tons, and a 50+ average feels like an unfinished symphony. The kind that lingers, haunts, but never truly leaves.

What stings most is that he couldn’t find a fix to his only weakness. That ball outside the off-stump. The corridor of uncertainty turned India’s biggest batting superstar into a meme. Edged & Taken! Again and again! Slow-mo replays on loop! The cover drive still sang, but somewhere along the way, the artist stopped reinventing.

And that’s why skipper Kohli will always stand taller.

He will be immortalised for the culture shift. He will be remembered for his raw and unapologetic captaincy. Blood, sweat, sledges. There was nothing selfless about it. No laid-back BS. He stared into your eyes and did not blink. Under his reign, victory wasn’t the only goal. Dominance was. Pace, pride, and fearlessness mattered…just as much as the scoreboard.

Test cricket will miss Virat Kohli. The batter, sure. But skipper Kohli…it’ll feel in its bones. He didn’t just champion the format; he reshaped its soul, gave it teeth, swagger, and made it bleed pride again.