Virat Kohli throws a bridge across two cultures

There’s a small canvas, a copy of a painting by J.M.W. Turner on the wall of my study roughly at cover point in relation to the television set. On Sunday night, as Virat Kohli drilled Nathan Coulter-Nile through the covers in Mohali, the canvas fell off the wall. Somehow it seemed natural. As if Kohli’s drive had travelled through many dimensions to knock down the work of an 18thcentury English artist thousands of kilometres away.

It was one of the great 19th over counterattacks. Four boundaries — each of them fit to be preserved in a cricket museum for its textbook contours and grace under pressure — meant that the mountain of a chase had been reduced to a molehill.

That innings didn’t just bring victory, it stamped the format with the seal of acceptance. “Maybe there’s something in this format after all,” a T20 sceptic messaged me at the end of it. Here was a young man at the peak of his powers demonstrating the classical underlying the innovative, and the essential grammar upon which all batsmanship is built. It was too a reaffirmation that the best batting can still be the technically soundest one. T20 is cricket after all!

It was said of the great Ranji in England that he “never played a Christian stroke in his life.” How ironic then, that in the format ostensibly built on unchristian strokes, it was the almost Biblical batting of its finest exponent, the orthodoxy of his strokeplay that made the difference.

Comparisons are ridiculous

The comparisons have already begun, of course. That is the nature of sport. Pigeon-holing is a fan’s favourite activity. Today’s heroes seem more heroic, their achievements of greater significance and their methods more natural than yesterday’s.

I will just say that when Sachin Tendulkar made the first double century in one-day international cricket, he was orthodoxy personified too, and leave it at that. Odious or not, comparisons are ridiculous. But Bradman, Richards, Lara, Tendulkar — who, among them, played a grand total of one T20 international — have already been rolled out in that game-after-the-game which is emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Immature batsmen attempt to innovate, defacing what they take; mature batsmen adapt the manual. For every cringe-evoking shot played by a desperate batsman for whom the end justifies the means, Kohli had a phalanx of answers both visually pleasing and thoroughly effective. His understanding of space and time is unrivalled.

Maybe there’s something in this format after all. A.B. de Villiers might have emerged as the 360-degree man, capable of hitting the ball to any part of the field, and Chris Gayle might be the destroyer supreme with his six-shooter, but Kohli’s lesson has been the most important. He was saying: Hey, we haven’t fully explored the possibilities in traditional strokeplay yet.

Just as it takes a genius to find a way of inventing strokes to send the ball to untenanted parts of the field, it takes one to tell us that you can be just as effective by playing the angles which is the key in all sports involving a moving ball. Soccer players know the importance of off the ball running and creating angles, tennis players have overcome big hitters by controlling the angles. Kohli was merely returning a sport to its basics, and by doing that he rendered it a signal service.

Credibility problem

Ever since it was devised, T20 has had a credibility problem. It was more entertainment than cricket, felt some, basing that judgement mostly on the IPL and other domestic leagues. It attracted gimmickry, and divided families, though not quite in the same manner in which it divided mine. My son is a Test match man, my mother a T20 fan! There is little meeting ground. You looked down upon the slam-bang game, and found reasons to stick to “real cricket”.

Kohli has thrown a bridge across the two cultures, assuring us, like some critics have, that the essential difference between two aspects of writing or music or art or films or indeed cricket is not the difference between the highbrow and the lowbrow. It is simpler than that: something is either sound or unsound. You can enjoy the classical with the popular; you can bring the classical to bear upon the popular and be successful.

T20 is said to have influenced Test cricket more than the other way round. Now here is Kohli telling us that the traffic is sometimes in the opposite direction. The straight bat, the body close to the ball, the gradual build-up of an innings is as much part of the 120-ball game too.

For some years now, the attempt has been to bring T20 fans to Test match cricket; it was thought getting the five-day enthusiast to endorse the shortest format of the game was both impossible and unnecessary.

The ‘cricketisation’ of T20 has been Kohli’s contribution to the World Cup. Meanwhile I have shifted that Turner canvas to square leg.