Comparisons, especially when made across multiple time lines, can be an engaging exercise in futility. They rekindle pleasant memories but achieve no concrete result. India has been playing international cricket for almost nine decades and a century is round the corner. It has never been in such good health, its financial strength having finally translated into producing a world-beating team that is led by someone who could well be a contender for the tag of India’s greatest batsman ever.
As another decade is consigned to the dustbin of history and we look forward to greater prosperity in India’s cricketing growth, Virat Kohli has emerged as that unbreakable fulcrum around which the team revolves and reaps rewards of unprecedented success. His steely resolve and an inexhaustible desire for excellence has resulted in the transformation of a talented cricketer into a vast reservoir of unimaginable depth, who can now challenge the past legends to the tag of greatest ever.
For those of us who watched cricket in the pre-Sachin Tendulkar era, Sunil Gavaskar was the ultimate word in batting perfection. He took on the menacing greyhounds of the West Indian attack with the calmness of a meditating monk and wore them down with his textbook technique and unlimited patience. For a team struggling to stay afloat most of the time, Gavaskar’s batting feats were an exceptional example of courage and skill, achieved against the greatest of odds in hostile conditions that would be hard to match, leave alone surpass.
When we were convinced that the world had seen the final picture of perfection, a chubby little boy entered our consciousness with a volcanic force and stamped his greatness even before he had crossed his teens. Just like a mythical character whose future is predicted even before he is born, Tendulkar’s phenomenal march to the “greatest ever” was foreseen even before he had played for India.
As time passed and Tendulkar overshadowed everything around him, Gavaskar started fading from memory. Tendulkar now was a new era Bradman, surpassing not just all batting records, but outliving most of his contemporaries. An ageless wonder who could go on and on, playing and making runs.
It was a rude awakening for his millions of fans that even the best are subject to the laws of nature and there is nothing permanent in this world, not even Tendulkar! Around the same time the “god” of Indian cricket was quitting centre stage, an errant boy with rich promise was making his way into the Indian team. This young man, bursting with uncontrollable energy, had led India to an Under-19 World Cup win and many feared his untamed energies more than his talent.
When and how Kohli channelized his “human” instincts into a more positive direction is a story in itself and best left for him to tell someday. What it achieved for him was a metamorphosis that had a profound impact on his cricket. Kohli is a perfect example of what a disciplined life can lead to, especially for sportspersons who depend too much on body strength. The party animal now became a gym addict and a diet-conscious athlete who was willing to go to extreme lengths to enhance his skills.
The remarkable aspect of Kohli’s transformation from one among many to the only one among many, is his phenomenal concentration while batting, a la Gavaskar, without losing his restless, anxious persona while leading his troops in the field. While his batting has multiple dimensions, self-belief being perhaps its most stand-out feature, his explosive temper, though muted and controlled now, lends him a distinct aura that Gavaskar and especially Tendulkar lacked.
He is this very strange phenomenon, who is robotic when it comes to adhering to the discipline and training to improve his craft and very human when it comes to displaying his emotions. There is so far that “unbreakable will” on display that combines so perfectly with his skills to have made him into a run-making machine.
Is he the greatest? No. For the generation I belong to, there can be no one better than Gavaskar. He took on the world, fighting alone, scoring runs in a heap and lending a defeated team dignity and respect.
For the later generation Tendulkar is peerless, a symbol of India’s march into a world which finally took note of India’s strength and power. Can Kohli replace Tendulkar in popular imagination or has he already done so? These are questions that can have no one answer, as the very nature of comparisons across different periods are subject to and limited by the time and place of the present moment we live in.