Why Virat Kohli can be the next Sourav Ganguly

My heart ached as I saw England conquer their final frontier having waited 28 years for it. They say ‘Sabar ka fal meetha hota hai’ and we are not alien to this saying especially having tasted it on 2nd April, 2011 at Wankhede exactly after 28 years too. The British too made their wait worth it by beating the ODI World Champions in their own backyard. We have always been more like meek cats away from home, shy and easily bullied by the tall and fast seamers, but as far as playing at home was concerned, we indeed were the ‘Tigers’. I am surprised how an avid die-hard Indian supporter has started using terms like ‘we were tigers’, and for this I give credit to our recent performances in the Test matches over the past two years. We have always found excuses to defend ourselves when it came to losing Test series’ away from home with claims such as ‘our boys are not used to such bouncy wickets, short balls are our weakness, etc’. But how are we going to justify ‘our players cannot play spin too’? Sadly, that leaves us with no option but to claim ‘you see, we were working on playing the seamers ever since we lost to England in England, so may be in the bargain we forgot how to play spin. So now our focus will be to play spinners’. Yes, right, Mr. Optimist, this is exactly what we did.

They say every series defeat comes with a wake-up call to the Indian national cricket selectors who hit the snooze button post axing two or three newcomers, but I think this one must be the one without the snooze button and must be paid heed to, by actually waking up. Calls for Dhoni being stripped off captaincy is what we all have been hearing, courtesy ‘lions at home’ being tamed and having become ‘Dhobi ka kutta, naa ghar ka na overseas ka’. 99 in the Nagpur Test against England might help Dhoni safeguard his position in the team as a wicketkeeper-batsman but his position as the helmsman of the ship called ‘Team India’ is in serious danger thanks to his attitude to avoid a 3-1 defeat rather than force a 2-2 finish, which was evident from the lack of aggression, having wasted an hour scoring 29 runs in 13 overs on the crucial 4th day, which was India’s only chance at saving a face in this series.

I would like to take you all into a little flashback. We are right now in the year 2000. The Indian team was struggling during the pre-Ganguly era after being marred by Azharuddin’s antics thanks to the match-fixing scandal. Tendulkar himself had washed his hands off the captaincy role owing to ill health and there emerged the second-best choice, the young and aggressive Dada on the hot seat. It was indeed a hot-seat that time as India literally found itself in dire straits having lost back-to-back Test series’ against Australia and South Africa. ‘The God of the off-side’ as he is nicknamed, was struggling in the Tests prior to his appointment, but was riding on excellent One-Day performances with five centuries over the season which saw him go to the top of PWC One-Day rankings for batsmen. Now at this point in time, let us all analyse the so-called statistics of ‘The Prince of Kolkata’. He was just 4 years into playing cricket, he did not have the experience to take up such a high-pressure and a demanding job and the Australia series lead by Steve Waugh was round the corner. Given this scenario, would we still go ahead to make Ganguly the captain? I request you to keep the bias of him later becoming the most successful captain in Indian cricket‘s history aside and to think would we really advocate him becoming the captain or would we prefer a senior player to head the team?

Fast forward to 2012: I see a parallel to what both India and Virat Kohli are going through now. While India has lost most of the Tests both home and away, Virat, more or less, is struggling with his Test form despite a crucial century in the Nagpur Test against England, but he is ranked No. 2 in the ICC ODI Batsmen rankings, right behind Hashim Amla. The Aussies were about to tour India then and so is the case now. More so, Indians then were mourning Sachin’s retirement from captaincy and today Indians are mourning Sachin’s retirement from ODIs. Both came as a shocker while the latter has brought Mayan’s apocalypse true to a large extent as far as the Indian cricketing community goes. Life cannot give you more instances of coincidences than these.

People are saying he is aggressive, he still is inexperienced and so on and so forth. Kohli’s inexperience and age are strong points for arguments as far as the protesters go. But history speaks for itself when Graeme Smith did it for South Africa at the age of 22. We all knew he was not yet prepared to shoulder the burden of leading the team in the presence of Proteas great like Jacques Kallis, especially given the circumstances South Africa found themselves in, post the 2003 World Cup preliminary round exit. But little did we know that this young 22-year-old was destined to write his name in the South Africa list of honours as one of their most successful leaders. Lifting the team from the wrenches – as left by another South African great, Shaun Pollock, who in all honesty knew he was struggling and willingly stepped aside – was not going to be a cakewalk but the young fearless lad took the opportunity head-on. He might not be a tactically brilliant captain, but his posture and attitude on the field to motivate his boys and get the best out of them each time was enough to earn him the respect of millions worldwide.

So, with the Aussies out to do some hunting on the Indian soil, ready to make mincemeat of the Indian Tiger, can we not let Virat lead from here? Remember what young Ganguly did when he was up against the big-shot Aussie Steve Waugh, for whom the game began right at the press conference, on the eve of the match? He took the game to him and made Steve Waugh wait for him for the toss by deliberately going late, not once but apparently, seven times, during the entire historic series. This he said, was to teach his opponents a lesson for their rude behaviour. At times, you really need to go out of your way to welcome your opponent because as far as cricket goes in India, from the fans’ perspective, in every game that we play, we indeed want the ‘Men in Blue’ to go to war and not to make love. And the only player capable of pulling off something like this in the Indian dressing room today is none other than Virat Kohli. Dhoni never matched Cook’s efforts in the entire series and that is also one of the reasons why India failed. Cook clearly wanted to win this one more than Dhoni did, and he succeeded. With Michael Clarke in the form of his life and waiting to tame the Indians, again only Kohli is capable of matching him run-for-run, and he is one who is thoroughly respected by both the senior and junior members of the Indian dressing room.

Kohli, over the past twelve months, has really been in the pursuit to transform himself into becoming a potential leader, having been successful with the willow and guiding India to victory not once or twice, but time and again. He is known to be a fighting character and has talent under his belt. I still remember the disappointment in his face at the time of the loss in Australia where he put his heart out for India to go past the line, but Jayawardene’s men had other plans. His young blood still boils at failures and at this point in time, where we are at mercy’s feet, we need a captain like this. I think we all have forgotten 2008 wherein he led the Indian U-19 colts to a World Cup victory in Kuala Lampur. He led from the front there, and since then, has only grown strength-to-strength. No wonder he became the first Indian to score a century on his World Cup debut. They say there are only two ways to handle pressure, either you fight it out or soak it. To say the least, Virat has become like an absorbent, he simply soaks the pressure or let’s say he just thrives under it. The temperament he has shown so far has been really impressive and I really hope that post this article, he doesn’t change my views. All these facts just propel me to believe one thing that we have another Dada in the making. So let us not turn oblivion to the opportunity thrown at us, and try everything possible to get the Indian train on track again. Gospel says that life hardly gives us a second chance; unless of course if we are a Rohit Sharma or a Piyush Chawla. I hope this falls on the ears of the decision-makers that another Dada is waiting there in the dressing room and trust me, it certainly is not too early to say it.