Virat and the frictionless ton

Reflections on the state of the 51st...

Just bung a bit more white at the top, cheers…

Fittingly for a Sunday evening, Virat Kohli added a few fresh daubs on his personal Sistine Chapel ceiling. The Michelangelo of the 50 over game made a hundred so age-appropriate and heat-free that it almost qualified for its own sub-category: the frictionless ton.

Immediately afterwards, he said this: “It was more or less the way I play ODI cricket. So I was happy with the template."

We must remind ourselves that this was a game watched by a billion people and played by fallible human beings. Yes, everything was in his favour. It was a low-fi chase of a sub-par score on an easy-ish pitch, a big, slow outfield that rewarded hard running, a neutral venue that made a joke of ‘home’ advantage. If any team was at home, India was and is. If any batter was at home, it was Kohli.

He has been the punchiest of opponents, a white-line fever specialist whose audacity yanked giant crowds onto their feet and out of their tiny minds, a rider on the great swells of emotion that batting produces, a big-mouth gunslinger who backed up his words with action, a flash wide boy with the soft, brown eyes of a poet.

Batting demands ego. Any decent line-up is splattered with it. In a game of eleven against one, ego is a core component. But it can feel elusive, even for the natural alphas, and it can appear foolish when it’s all that is on display. Life has bruised Kohli enough for him to understand, and his ego eased back as unsteadily as his cover drive, peeping through only occasionally.

It came once when he tried to catch a shy at the stumps having made his ground – the commentators seemed baffled as to what he’d done, but it was pretty obvious. He was Champing the opposition, picking up their ball, patting their heads, letting them know it was his game, they were just playing in it. And it came out again at the end: “I told you… relax,” he mouthed at the India rooms after he’d struck the boundary he needed for the hundred and the win.

That time it looked more like relief. Once Pakistan backs were broken, Shreyas was ready to play ball, divvying up the remaining runs and treating himself to the occasional giant six to keep his eye in. But Hardik didn’t appear to get the memo, or give a shit as he teed off, and it was only Axar’s gingerly struck single that gave Kohli the chance at the end - has anyone pushed a ball to long on with more pressure…

In his mastery of the chase, it has been what watching Bradman must have been, seeeing someone far ahead of the rest, so much more accomplished and certain that their place in history is self-evident. He leads the records, even Tendulkar’s, by Bradmanesque percentages. And yet the frictionless 51st ton felt like what it was: an ending not of a career but of an era of batting.

A hundred like that one required very particular and narrow circumstances that appear rarely now and will fade even further. The hundreds that came the day before, by Ben Duckett and Josh Inglis, and the shimmering batting of Shubman Gill, are of a different measure. Virat’s template is no longer the template, at least not often. Players like Abishekh and Jaiswal wait their turn, sit it out for the changing of the guard that may come with a win in this tournament so loaded in India’s favour.

Frank Sinatra could still sing My Way in his 80s and it could still rip the hearts out of his crowd. It was all the other stuff that got more difficult. Virat could bat for another four years, another cycle of international cricket, but it would not be his cycle, not his template. So a showman can fall one way or the other. Go soon and leave the world wanting more. Go late and play with the legacy.

Maybe there will be one more innings like this to see him out, one last chase, one last chance to clear his throat and do his thing, one more frictionless ton for the greatest ever to do it. Maybe…