CHENNAI: In hindsight, when Virat Kohli wore his beloved Test whites for the first time, a June morning many moons ago in West Indies, it set in stone a beginning of a new era as well as the beginning of the end of one. Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman were about to retire, an aging Sachin Tendulkar was on a break and Kohli, by sheer force of will and a testament to unflinching ethos even back then, had become an all-format player.
Over the next two years, India's modern batting greats retired. One by one. Laxman. Dravid. Virender Sehwag. Tendulkar. An endless conveyor belt of batting talent meant able replacements were ready. Plug and play.
But Kohli wasn't just any plug and play. He changed the goalposts. His arrival into Indian cricket, especially their Test team, changed the contours of what was possible. He did so in multiple ways. His batting spoke for itself, his captaincy set a new benchmark and the way he read the game lit the blue touchpaper in ways Indians weren't accustomed to.
He was unapologetic, his intensity rubbed of on his teammates as well as the paying public and he bent many a Test through sheer character and tenacity. If his captaincy took India to new heights — it's not a surprise he's their winningest captain in the five-day format — his approach with the bat won him his first admirers.
Going purely by Test cricket's age-old batting metric — an average of over 50 over a number of seasons in myriad conditions — he under-punched. But that's missing the tree for the woods. For the vast majority of 123 Tests, 210 innings, 9230 runs, 30 100s and 31 50s, he was sui generis. Sure, you would likely pay more to watch Sachin Tendulkar, ask Rahul Dravid to pad up first if your life depended on it or give Sunil Gavaskar a ring first if you wanted a cricketer to give a lecture on the art of batting.
But when Kohli strode out to bat, the experience was more visceral, a lot of theatre. His energy was so rare it transmitted across crowds up and down the ever-shrinking five-day space in multiple continents. From Wanderers to Wankhede and Birmingham to Brisbane, he put bums on seats.
It's no surprise, then, that Kohli's final red-ball match in the country — a Ranji Trophy encounter in New Delhi against Railways — saw more than 12,000 move through the turnstiles on a weekday.
Never mind the fact that there was one telling weakness — flirting with a nibbling ball outside off stump (his first and last dismissals in Tests were outside edges off deliveries past the fourth stump line). The meat in the sandwich, though, woof.
For over a decade, Kohli kept chiselling away to become the best batter that he could be. If Tendulkar was pre-ordained for greatness, Kohli's path to mastery of batsmanship was via hard work and recognising the modern demands of an athlete.
In a fire-side chat with presenter Isa Guha in March, the former India captain had said: "There was a realisation that I needed to change the way I'm preparing as an athlete. The next day onwards, I changed everything about my diet and training. The motivation was something that came from within. No one had to force me. If I'm starting off physically underprepared or lesser than the opposition, then how am I be giving myself a chance to succeed?"
If his batting was forged in this ideal of having to suffer to become a great, he adopted this same ideal when he was appointed captain of the Indian Test team. "Eventually you look at what happened after I became captain and we started to bring in this kind of culture into the team as well," he said in the same chat. "It became a fabric that went into the culture of Indian cricket. That was a great lesson for me as well. If the vision is larger and the intent is for the greater good of everyone around you. Then you can still lead it."
Even if Kohli the batter can still be compared to Tendulkar, Gavaskar and Dravid -- the only three Indian batting greats to have scored over 10000 in Tests -- what made Kohli's Test career genuinely Everestian was his approach to captaincy and leadership.
It's also what helped India become a great Test playing nation. In 2015, four years before the World Test Championship (WTC) came about, he set the dice rolling on challenging wickets at home. "I don't mind compromising on (batsmen's) averages as long as we are winning Test matches," he had said after a game against South Africa. "I think that's our main concern, we are not playing for records... if you don't take 20 wickets, you can have an average of 55, it doesn't matter."
Just like in 2011, Kohli's exit from the scene will herald not just the beginning of a new era but the beginning of the end of one.
