R. Sridhar on Virat Kohli | Excerpt from Coaching Beyond
Virat: A Man Possessed
Let’s discuss Virat first. There isn’t much I can add about his ability as a batter that more accomplished wordsmiths haven’t presented. What I can say is that I was privy to the effort that went into making Virat the modern master he has become, particularly after the career-defining Test series in England in 2014. I wasn’t in England during the Test series, but watching
the action unfold on television, I couldn’t help but wonder how such a fabulous batter was repeatedly being sucked into playing deliveries outside off stump, especially by James Anderson, the master of swing who was getting the ball to go away from
Virat very late.
By then, Virat had played international cricket for six years, and Test cricket for three. He was expected to be the bulwark of Indian batting for the foreseeable future and had done justice to expectations with impressive runs, especially in limited-overs cricket, where his pedigree was well established.
England, though, offers challenges unique and myriad. If you go through the manuals pertaining to technique, you will realize that most of them have been formulated keeping English conditions in mind. That’s perhaps because a lot of the original emanated from England, but especially for batters from the subcontinent, even today, England is the ultimate test of their skills, their character and their resilience.
A five-Test series is a double-edged sword. Depending on which way you look at it, it either gives you the opportunity to bounce back from an iffy start, or it can weigh you down mentally and lure you into the same errors that undermined you at the very beginning. In Virat’s case, the 2014 series offered no respite. There was little time to work on his batting because in a five-Test series, the matches come thick and fast. Between travel and team training, it’s impossible to find the time and the energy to focus singularly on technical issues. That isn’t ideal, but given how tightly packed the international schedule is, it is inevitable. For a proud competitor like Virat, returns of 134 runs from 10 innings must have been particularly galling. It was under these circumstances that I first met Virat in my capacity as the fielding coach of the national team. Zimbabwe’s Duncan Fletcher continued to be the coach, but the BCCI brought Ravi Shastri on board as the team director. Ravi handpicked Sanjay Bangar, Bharat Arun and yours truly to help out with the batting, bowling and fielding side of things, respectively, ahead of the limited-overs leg on that tour. The four of us landed in London the morning after the Test series ended, joined up with the squad at the team hotel and, after breakfast, we all took the bus to Bristol, where the one-day series was scheduled to kick off.
Hardly had I settled down and started to unpack when the phone in my room rang. Virat was at the other end, asking if I could join him for lunch and if I could bring Arun along with
me. We already had a good rapport following our trysts at the NCA, and I was eager to catch up with him, lend a shoulder if he so needed and chart the way forward because I knew he
wouldn’t take this failure lying down.
By the time the three of us—myself, Virat and Arun—left the hotel, all the Indian restaurants in our vicinity had unfortunately closed, so we ended up at a Subway outlet. Soon, as we grabbed our orders and made our way to a table, Virat’s sunny disposition disappeared. He was angry with himself, and he was keen to vent to men he trusted. He just wanted to get things off his chest, and Arun and I listened to him patiently and sympathetically
when he talked about administrative, off-field niggles that had irked him during the tour.
Once Virat spewed everything out, he calmed down visibly.
You could see the steely resolve in his eyes. You didn’t actually need him to tell you, ‘Never again will this happen to me, I will make sure of that.’
To read more about R. Sridhar’s journey with the Indian Cricketing Team (Men) get a copy of Coaching Beyond here.