Magnetic, aggressive: Australia brought out the best and worst in Virat Kohli

In October 2008, Ricky Ponting’s Australian side played a warm-up match against an Indian board XI in Hyderabad and the early going was good.

The hosts were teetering at 4-120 against Brett Lee, Mitchell Johnson, Stuart Clark and a young Peter Siddle when a pair of striplings came together at the batting crease: 21-year-old Rohit Sharma and 19-year-old Virat Kohli.

Virat Kohli has bid farewell to Test cricket.Credit: Getty Images

In the next 30 overs they put on 146, both making rapid centuries, and dismantling the Australians’ lead spinner, Jason Krejza. So severe was the attack on Krejza that selection chairman Andrew Hilditch related to his panel that “we can’t pick him, they’ve just slaughtered him in the tour game”.

But it turned out that the bigger story would be the two young Indian players.

Rohit was already part of the national team set-up and highly gifted, going on to a great career for India as a fearless batter and then a languid, trophy-winning captain.

Kohli, though, was something else.

Back then it would have been impossible to argue that any cricketer might have a greater impact on Indian and world cricket than Sachin Tendulkar, who nabbed the world record for most Test runs later in that same 2008 Test series.

But by dominating in three formats, captaining India to unprecedented achievements overseas and being the most magnetic, aggressive figure on the field, it has to be concluded that Kohli did just that before announcing his retirement from Test cricket via Instagram on Monday.

For Australians, there was fascination with Kohli for his combination of incredible batting skill and spikiness on the field that reminded many of their own.

Kohli’s first series in Australia, in 2011-12, was an unexpectedly lopsided romp for the team led by Michael Clarke. In spite of the 4-0 scoreline, Kohli showed more defiance than many of his older contemporaries, capping it off with a century in Adelaide.

He also gained some early infamy for flipping the bird at SCG spectators.

“The match referee [Ranjan Madugalle] called me to his room the next day and I’m like, ‘what’s wrong?’,” Kohli told Wisden of their exchange in 2018. “He said, ‘what happened at the boundary yesterday?’. I said, ‘nothing, it was a bit of banter’.

“Then he threw the newspaper in front of me and there was this big image of me flicking on the front page and I said, ‘I’m so sorry, please don’t ban me!’

“I got away with that one. He was a nice guy, he understood I was young and these things happen. I really laugh at a lot of the things I did when I was younger, but I’m proud that I did not change my ways because I was always going to be who I am and not change for the world or anyone else. I was pretty happy with who I was.”

This was the start of a running battle with Australian spectators that ended when Kohli made sandpaper gestures to the same crowd on what became his final day as a Test cricketer in January this year.

But it was also true that the Delhi street fighter’s instinct, which made Kohli so much more feisty than many of his Indian cricketing forebears, was the vital competitive spark that made him equal parts brilliant and watchable.

That combination of outstanding innings and adversarial moments typified Kohli and Australia for most of the ensuing decade. He was always the most exuberant celebrator of wickets in the field, never shy of a word, and often in his opponents’ faces. Sam Konstas, on the receiving end of a Boxing Day shoulder charge from Kohli, was the last of many to feel his competitive wrath.

The unsavoury shared space with so many innings to savour. In Chennai in 2013 he shared the stage with Tendulkar to set India on the path to their own 4-0 beating of Australia.

Sublime centuries were crafted in each innings of the Phillip Hughes Test at Adelaide Oval the following year, which took India to within reach of victory before Nathan Lyon had the final word.

Hundreds in Melbourne and Sydney put Kohli head-to-head with Steve Smith as the outstanding talents of their generation. With Kane Williamson and Joe Root they were to be dubbed the “fab four”.

By succeeding the implacable MS Dhoni as captain, Kohli showed no intent to tone down his fire for leadership. Australia’s bout with India in 2017 was as hot-tempered as they come, culminating with Kohli all but accusing Smith’s men of cheating by trying to consult the team viewing area for decision reviews.

It was also some of a pivot point in the duel between Kohli and Australia’s bowlers. Entering the series, Kohli averaged better than 60 against Australia, with six centuries in 12 Tests. In 18 subsequent matches, Kohli reached three figures only three more times, and his average slid back to 31.

The exception to that trend came in Perth in December 2018, when India faced an Australian team that had, in fact, fallen afoul of the cultural issues Kohli seemed to sniff during their previous meeting. There was no Smith or David Warner in the team that summer, but Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood were still supremely challenging on a lightning-fast Perth pitch in the process of cracking up.

Kohli’s 123 was a masterpiece, the equal of any innings by a south Asian player in such fast conditions, and another parallel with Tendulkar, who made a legendary hundred in a losing cause at the WACA Ground in 1992.

Australia won the match but not the series. It was altogether fitting that Kohli became the first Indian captain to lift the Border-Gavaskar Trophy on Australian soil, for his relentless pursuit of excellence had helped spread his team’s horizons to a point that such a result was possible.

There was a postscript, as well, to the run-ins with Smith. At the 2019 World Cup, when all of England seemed to want to hurl abuse at an Australian team chastened by the Newlands scandal, it was Kohli who called for some decorum.

Steve Smith’s career has run parallel with Virat Kohli’s.Credit: AP

“We’ve had issues in the past. We’ve had a few arguments on the field. But you don’t want to see a guy feeling that heat every time he goes out to play,” Kohli said of Smith. “So just because there’s so many Indian fans here, I just didn’t want them to set a bad example, to be honest.

“I felt bad because if I was in a position where something had happened with me and I had apologised, I accepted it and I came back and still I would get booed, I wouldn’t like it, either.”

So there was a mellowing to Kohli over time. In 2023, during a home series win over Australia, the private Kohli could be glimpsed with his family at a hotel restaurant in Indore after the third Test. The entire restaurant, it seemed, was booked out for Kohli to enjoy a little solitude, something that could be hard to find as perhaps the most recognised man in India.

A few days later, Kohli won the adulation of huge crowds at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, as he took advantage of a docile surface to make what would be his penultimate century against Australia. By the end, those sorts of pitches were becoming increasingly scarce in Test cricket, and Kohli’s inability to avoid chasing balls outside off stump led inexorably to this week’s retirement call.

But the best measure of Kohli’s influence is perhaps best taken by how, in his absence, a young Indian side won again in Australia in 2020-21, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. By doing so, they showed the same kind of fearlessness that made Ponting and company think of Kohli as someone to watch in Hyderabad, all of 17 years ago.

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