Steve Jobs once said that you shall never be able to connect the dots by looking forward but only looking backward. Even though it has been one of his controversial statements but it fits perfectly with Virat Kohli’s current performance during this ongoing T20 World Cup. An article published in The Times Of India, today, states that Virat Kohli had very unexpectedly returned to form after being out of it for the past three years and is presently the leading batsman in the T20 World Cup.
In order to return to the form of his T20 career, Kohli has drawn inspiration from the past. Some would call it luck but Kohli had used the Australian conditions to his advantage during this time. Although the crowd and the fans of Kohli have been aware since the beginning that something magical would happen here in Australia from Kohli. And indeed the match between India and Pakistan has turned out to be the best knock so far in this tournament.
It had left everyone impressed so much that even the former coach of India and the Australian legend, Greg Chapel who usually is not a fan of this format of the game, hailed Kohli’s knock as God’s song. In fact, Greg was so impressed and overwhelmed by Kohli’s performance that he went on to say that the inning was more of a form of art and that he hasn’t seen such a game in the last 15 years of his life.
Usually, no one associates art with the T20 format of the game but the knock that Kohli played the power strokes has indeed turned it into a revolutionary momentum. The success of Kohli here on this ground is been referred back to the days of the Asia Cup where he had scored a magnificent century against Afghanistan on a dead pitch. The cricketers are all in praise of him stating that Kohli had gone to the basics, instead of trying to evaluate his current approach towards this game.
If one truly wishes to understand how Kohli had already analyzed everything even before the match took place in Australia, one has to give credit to the coach Rahul Dravid and the captain Rohit Sharma. They have been insistent on keeping an aggressive approach taking lessons from India’s performance in the previous edition of the T20 World Cup.
Before leaving for Australia to play the T20 World Cup, there had been multiple meetings with the top players, the captain, and the officials strategizing on the team build-up. They have put a lot of emphasis on their previous few big performances of Kohli and helped him by having their faith in his abilities and giving him the freedom to play his natural game. They backed him in playing good cricketing shots and finding the gaps at his own pace for reaching the ball across the other side of the boundary.
Even the pacer of the Indian team Bhubaneshwar Kumar had said that even though there has been an unpredictable performance from the bowling unit, it was important to make a more aggressive top order. This approach made Suryakumar Yadav play at number 4 and bring a change in the entire lineup so that everyone could play to their strengths.