Why Virat Kohli Should be Dropped from India’s ODI team
If England had the best luck imaginable in the last two weeks of the 2019 World Cup, one can say that the Indian selectors and team leadership also had a great stroke of luck when the final was the closest not just in World Cup history, but possibly in all ODIs. The reason: amidst the wave of sympathy for New Zealand and Kane Williamson and the cricketing world’s anger at the bizarre rules of play that saw them lose, India’s exit in the semi-final and the circumstances behind it were overlooked.
To fully understand what led up to this, one must go back two years to the 2017 Champions Trophy. Both games India lost in this tournament, including the big final, exposed fundamental problems in leadership and selection. While the loss to Sri Lanka in the league stage ended up being inconsequential, it highlighted Virat Kohli’s rigid, thoughtless captaincy. The loss in the final to Pakistan showed on the big stage what had been witnessed in bilateral series for a while up to (and even after this point): that India’s selection policy was abysmally poor and myopic.
Two things pointed to this. First, selecting Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja for a marquee tournament despite virtually no ODI cricket in their kitty since the 2015 World Cup. Second, the refusal to move beyond MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh. While the former was a mistake India corrected, the latter has remained a chronic problem that has resulted in the Indian batting order being set back a good 15 years to the time when the top three had to do close to everything and a weak middle order meant that chasing was India’s biggest weakness.
But an even bigger problem at the time was the ugly feud between Virat Kohli and then coach Anil Kumble. Amidst reports that Kumble was too “overbearing”, Indian cricket fell into the darkest quagmire since the days when local Rajas would get drafted into the national team and even become captains only because they would sponsor overseas tours.
When the BCCI decided that a dispute between a coach (who wasn’t a foreigner, but a legend of Indian cricket) and captain would end with the former being removed from his position, it set the worst precedent imaginable at the time. But even this they managed to top when they allowed Virat Kohli to handpick Kumble’s successor. This was a declaration that Kohli was the undisputed baahubali of Indian cricket and any disagreements with him (in the dressing room or commentary box) would not be tolerated and sycophancy would be rewarded.
A seemingly minor incident on India’s tour of England in 2018 also reinforced Kohli’s unchecked power in Indian cricket. In the midst of a torrid Test series, Hanuma Vihari was drafted into the squad and immediately frog-leaped Karun Nair into the playing XI. Several pundits, including Sunil Gavaskar, speculated that the Indian team management did not like Nair too much.
In the absence of any concrete evidence from the tightly sealed dressing room, it would appear that this was the think tank sending a message to the selectors saying that they weren’t happy with Nair’s selection in the first place. With Kohli being the man in charge (as coach Ravi Shastri has reiterated many times), it is safe to presume that the decision was his, reinforcing the idea that he was the top authority in Indian cricket now.
Within three and a half years of taking over the captaincy, Virat Kohli had single-handedly removed a former legend from the position of head coach and interfered in selection policy. His achievements in this time were not unprecedented; his success in Test cricket was largely thanks to a two-year home season which his predecessor, MS Dhoni, also enjoyed.
His first two major Test tours outside Asia resulted in series losses. The success that he did have in Tests and ODIs was largely due to a battery of wicket-taking bowlers hitting peak form. Under him cricketers were expressing discontent at the dissonant selection policy in the media or on Twitter at an unprecedented rate.
This alone should ideally have been enough to tell any cricketing board that Virat Kohli was not good for Indian cricket in the long run. Players like Kevin Pietersen had been sacked for a lot less by the ECB and even a legend like AB de Villiers was turned down by CSA when he offered to come out of retirement on the eve of the World Cup with South Africa’s batting looking weak.
On top of this, observers of Indian cricket would see time and again that on the field, MS Dhoni was often the one in charge of setting the field with occasional inputs from Rohit Sharma, while Kohli was simply manning the outfield, not even actively engaging in one of the two most crucial aspect of captaincy.
But Indian cricket has a different culture, and Kohli continued to blunder on. Of all the options available, Ambati Rayudu was chosen to be India’s №4 batsman nine months before the World Cup. The likes of AB de Villiers, Steve Smith, and Ross Taylor have batted at №4 for their respective teams in recent years, showing the skill required to handle the responsibility. №4 is a pivotal position in ODI cricket and the batsman batting here should be able to come out in the fifth over as well as the 35th. Having watched Rayudu play, very few would say that he inspired confidence in either scenario.
Rayudu was persisted with for almost 19 consecutive innings right till the eve of the World Cup. And suddenly, he was absent from the World Cup squad. An anonymous leak from the dressing room after the team’s semi-final exit claimed that the team management was just waiting for Rayudu to fail. Rayudu’s replacement was KL Rahul, who until just one year ago, was explicitly being considered only as a backup opener, not a №4. Even Vijay Shankar had barely gotten enough time in international cricket to get a sense of the responsibility at №4.
The argument is simple. Once Virat Kohli has given fairly clear evidence that he makes all the decisions in Indian cricket, it is completely fair to blame him for everything that goes wrong with selection and strategy and demand that he be sacked from his position.
But this isn’t all. Virat Kohli has now played three World Cups over eight years, one as rookie, one as vice-captain, and one as captain. It is a big sample size. In these, he has played six knockout games, in which he averages 12. His scores in World Cup semi-finals are 9, 1, and 1. The latter two were in chases, in which Kohli supposedly excels. In World Cup knockouts, he does not have a score above 40, nor has he struck at more than 75 runs per 100 deliveries in any of these innings.
His average in World Cups is 47, a full 12 points lower than his career average. Excluding games against West Indies, Zimbabwe, Ireland, Bangladesh, and other non-Test playing nations, this falls further to 39. Even this is boosted by an uncharacteristically lacklustre century against Pakistan in 2015 and an unbeaten knock against Sri Lanka in a dead rubber in 2019 — both teams that have not been a match for India in recent times. He has only two World Cup hundreds in 26 innings (he normally gets a hundred every 5.5 innings), that too against Bangladesh and Pakistan.
A reason why Yuvraj Singh is often hailed as one of the greatest ODI batsmen to come out of India is that he was a big-match player. He kept clawing his way back into the Indian team despite several setbacks because of his ability step up at the big stage. His teammates from the 2007 World T20 and 2011 World Cup often acknowledge that they won these tournaments because of him. The two match-winning innings he played in crucial knockout games in each of these tournaments were against India’s most dreaded opponent, Australia. Which is why no one cares that his career average is under 40 and strike rate below 90.
Virat Kohli is Yuvraj’s antithesis. His numbers in ODI cricket boggle the mind but they dip so sharply in big games and world tournaments despite such a large sample size that it can be said with complete certainty that Virat Kohli is not a big-match player and it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be one.
England’s World Cup win, while the most fortuitous in the history of the tournament, is seen as proof that if you plan for the next World Cup right after the previous one ends, you can lift the trophy. When there is an endless schedule of meaningless bilateral series in the sport, no one remembers or cares that South Africa have the highest win percentage in ODI cricket; they only remember that Australia have won five World Cups and are therefore, the best team in ODI history.
It has been said that in the last four years, there is a pattern with the Indian team which resembles South Africa: choking in the big games. And in the last two years, India’s incredible ODI win percentage also makes them quite similar to the Proteas. If India want to go the South Africa way, then yes, they should continue on the path they’re on.
But if they want to prioritise world tournaments over bilateral wins, sacrifice the battle for the war, they need to plan for 2023 starting now. And if they do that, then there is little doubt that a captain whose arrogance and sense of self-importance far outstrip his tactical acumen who also happens to be a batsman who has proven repeatedly that he cannot handle the pressure of big World Cup matches needs to be removed from the ODI team immediately.
