Can Kohli complete his mission with a win in SA, asks Rudraneil Sengupta - Hindustan Times
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Can Kohli complete his mission with a win in SA, asks Rudraneil Sengupta

ByRudraneil Sengupta
Dec 10, 2021 11:11 PM IST

It’s the only country where India have never won a Test series. This squad could change that, if the skipper can step up too.

To Virat Kohli, a man driven by fierce ambition, South Africa offers an alluring, delicious possibility. It is the only country where India has never won a Test series. When Kohli’s India begin their three-Test series on December 26 at the Centurion, the captain will be using that fact as added motivation. This is the one remaining frontier in India’s Test history.

Virat Kohli is one of the best there is. India’s brilliant Test record in the last few years owes a lot to his prolific, heavyweight scoring. But to win in South Africa, he must now rediscover his own form. (Getty Images) PREMIUM
Virat Kohli is one of the best there is. India’s brilliant Test record in the last few years owes a lot to his prolific, heavyweight scoring. But to win in South Africa, he must now rediscover his own form. (Getty Images)

The reason it possibly means more to Kohli than to any of India’s previous Test skippers goes back seven years, to when he first took charge of the team. He often spoken then of how he wanted to forge a team capable of visiting any country and winning a series there. In this crystalline mission, he found a fellow believer in then-head-coach Ravi Shastri. The two men set out, methodically, to build and empower a team that could do exactly that.

In 2018-19, Australia, whose home Test record is second to none, fell. It was the first time India had beaten Australia in Australia since they began touring in 1947. Kohli’s project had achieved lift-off.

But a few months before that, India had gone to South Africa, with Kohli confident that his team could make history with a first series win in that country. It didn’t happen.

The post-mortem focused on Kohli’s propensity to constantly tinker with his playing XI, and his decision to drop Ajinkya Rahane, then in good form, from the first two Tests. The irony is that Kohli may have to dig deep for the courage to drop Rahane again, this time for the very sound reason that the Mumbai batter is woefully out of form.

Either way, this could very well be the time India win. If Kohli believed he had the squad he needed in 2018, he should be positively jumping with glee at the squad he has now.

Jasprit Bumrah, who made his debut with that 2018 series in South Africa, has developed into one of the most lethal fast bowlers in the game right now, the face of India’s pace revolution. If he finished that tour with fourteen wickets from three matches, including a fifer on a fiery Wanderers pitch with jack-in-the-box bounce, what kind of assault could he unleash this time?

Then there’s the astonishing rise of Mohammed Siraj. The son of an autorickshaw driver from Hyderabad who first held a real cricket ball only in 2015, he was performing magic with it in Australia five years later. In 2018, there was arguably no bowler on Kohli’s squad as on top of his game as Siraj is now, so full of tricks and sleight of hand, with a deceptively sharp bouncer.

Add to that mix Mohammed Shami, who had a superb tour in 2018 in conditions that suit him perfectly, and Umesh Yadav, who should get a look-in on the faster pitches like the Centurion, or Wanderers, if it’s grassy and treacherous. That’s an attack that will hold its own against South Africa’s power trio of Kagiso Rabada, Anrich Nortje and Lungi Ngidi.

Hopefully Kohli has also learnt — and about time too — that you never leave R Ashwin on the bench. Whatever the conditions, he must play.

Now to the question of whether the India batting line-up has it in them to stand up to Rabada, Nortje and Ngidi (and for good measure, Duanne Olivier, who has been in sparkling form in domestic tournaments and is in the squad for the Tests). This is where it gets trickier, but any way one looks at it, the current India squad is packed with more batting talent than the one in 2018.

Beginning at the top, Rohit Sharma has made a remarkable transformation as a Test batter in the last two years, curbing his natural attacking instincts to discover a new flow. KL Rahul had a dominating run in England earlier this year, in a five-Test series that India was on the verge of winning before it decided to pull out of the final Test amid a Covid-19 scare just ahead of the start of the IPL season.

Shreyas Iyer is perhaps the most determined player on this team, having finally got his chance in the long format after a pretty hard year. He is hungry.

It’s the man who is leading India, whose ambition it is to win a Test series in every Test-playing nation, who is, in fact, struggling with the bat. Kohli’s form is now entering that zone where something just doesn’t feel right. He is one of the best there is, and India’s brilliant Test record in the last few years owes a lot to his prolific, heavyweight scoring. To complete his mission, Kohli must now rediscover his own form.

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