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Despite an anticlimatic finish to the 1st India vs England Test at Trent Bridge, there was no shortage of drama across the four days of action. Most intriguingly, Virat Kohli and James Anderson seem to have renewed their legendary rivalry.
The picture above offers a comparison between Kohli at Southampton in the first innings of the World Test Championship Final and the Indian skipper at Nottingham. Someone clearly seems to have alerted Kohli to the pitfalls of the open guard.
Initial stances are almost inconsequential. Batters use it simply because they can't stand on air when a bowler is steaming in, and because it sometimes aids their transition into a neutral position (see the third frame).
Faced with qualms about a gradually opening stance, Kohli seems to have slammed his initial feet position shut. The Indian skipper probably hopes that the body will be in a squarer position while facing England's outswinging bowlers.
Sure, Kohli could've simply realigned the backfoot with the square (and we don't really know if he's done that). But the keenness with which Virat Kohli has tinkered with his initial stance suggests that the backfoot realignment was part of a conscious – not subconscious – plan to counter the variant inswing, responsible for a chunk of his dismissals since Kyle Jamieson was born.
The closed initial stance allows him the best of both worlds: an uncurtailed downswing to meet the inswinger and extensive reach against the outswing. Not to imply that the rest of this is, but the sample space of one ball really does not tell us much about whether Kohli's neutral position has changed as a result of this intervention. But in theory, it should at least lead to his hips pointing squarer.
Then an Anderson inswinger came. It's what Kohli is set up to counter. And unlike viewers on television, he has the full knowledge that it's going to hoop. Not just this, but also the fact that a closed hip position lends him the certitude of being closer to the ball. It's also something he knows bowlers have been targeting him with; the occasional inswinger with the continual fourth-stump is the legitimized standard of attack against Kohli in Tests since the birth of Jamieson.
Add to that a general fearlessness to commit to the front foot, characteristic of the post-T20 era, and also Kohli himself being someone who likes to feel wood on ball. These three major factors, and two minor factors, drew Kohli into the shot. Then, like Lance Vance from GTA, like Cassius and Brutus, the ball seams away.
Let's try to understand this for a second. The seam on the Kohli ball, as recorded by CricViz, was 0.8 degrees. The ball was pitched just short of the full length, assumingly six meters from the batting crease. Kohli was possibly batting outside of his crease, maybe by a meter. The distance between bat and ball when the ball pitches is, by this very conservative estimate, five meters.
Seaming by 0.8 degrees, the ball would have deviated 69.8 centimeters from its assumed line by the time Kohli intercepted it. Grade 10 trigonometry. The width of the bat is 11 centimeters. A lesser batter would have missed getting bat to ball.
It was, in every way, the perfect ball. The hypothetical average batter would have been drawn in by the inswing and nicked off by the seam. Then there is Kohli, whose recent past must have planted in his mind the lookout of inswingers.
The Indian skipper finds the inswinger so much of a threat that in the short interval after a match held less than two months ago, he has made a major adjustment to enable himself to bat well.
It's the perfect ball to the average batter, it's even better against Kohli.
There's another interesting thing coming of this. According to CricViz's Rufus Bullough, Kohli's false shot percentage in 2018 was higher than it was in 2014. The false shots per wicket was almost four times higher. The edges went to hand in 2014, and in 2018 they did not.
For the longest time, I have maintained that a batter's elbow showing behind their body from the front cam is a sign of softer hands, of the batter gripping the bat with the tips of their fingers.
Of course, it could just be holding the bat closer to the body but that's observationally falsifiable. In Kohli's case, the backlift origination points were nearly identical in 2018 and 2021. But the elbow is no longer visible.
Virat Kohli and James Anderson have reinvented themselves
The implications of this are that more catches will carry to slip. Kohli's clean slate record off Anderson between 2014 and 2020 is asterisked by three dropped chances off the seamer. But again, it's not a large enough sample to make reliable judgments, and it's not as if there's a diaphanous cause for what can be a deliberate or inadvertent adjustment. We'll have to wait. But Anderson had help yesterday.
In what may seem like every way possible, Kohli is different today. He is the Apollo 13 to Apollo 11 of 2018, the revised edition of a successful exam prep book. History is redundant; there is little predictive power to the past occurrences of 2014, 2016 or 2018. This is your second ticket to a Disneyland amusement ride that has been upgraded since your last visit.
And that's not all. They're both at the fag ends of their careers (Anderson more than Kohli). They're past their peaks, and their games are a mangled mixture of years and years of technical interventions made to parry off inefficiencies; a relentless pursuit of excellence.
Kohli's bat tap is gone and he stands upright at the crease, the Harry S. Truman to the Roosevelt of 2014. Anderson moves side-on early in his stride, minimizes his jump, and has a freaking wobble ball that can swing one way and seam the other.
Past performances have limited relevance here. Kohli and Anderson are starting anew.
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