Virat Kohli - the supernova of Test cricket

He was hero, villain, zealot and totem - and he made you live every moment of his career with him.

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The finger. I remember the first time I saw it, and it stood out to me so much because it felt so alien to Indian cricket. Players had fought with the crowd before, but this was different. Sticking up your middle digit to the crowd, and having it shared to the world.

There was a seismic shift happening in the country, and the face of that - or the finger at least - was Virat Kohli. A new way, a new India.

Virat Kohli was different, a spoilt brat superstar, a kid who let nothing get in the way of his own quest for greatness. The man who didn’t just want a run, he wanted your run, he wanted to beat you for it. The run mattered, the contest more. Arrogance, diligence, and a quest only he knew the rules of. You were the supporting character in his world.

A man who fought for Test cricket and fought people within it. A contradiction, a showman, someone with one of the worst late-career slides and one of the best peaks ever.

Virat Kohli was a hero, villain, zealot, and totem. But he was also a Test star.

The thing with stars is that once the helium is gone, the core often turns to iron. There is no fire left. The star collapses. Sometimes the shockwaves from a supernova help build other stars. But they are not the same as the original. Kohli shone so bright, there will be other stars because of him. But they won’t be him.

Every single player wants to win. Some are obsessed with numbers, or dominating or whatever else. However, at their core, top professional athletes are all world-class competitors. So what does it take to stand out from that? To show that your passion for winning is not normal, or within the accepted limits of high performance? That it is part of your soul. That, is Virat Kohli.

He wanted to win more than a generation of Australians who were brought up on the idea that victory was all that mattered.

That was something deep in Kohli. Was he as naturally gifted as AB de Villiers? No. Was he as good a Test batter as Steve Smith? No. Yet Kohli willed himself into this conversation because that was his magic skill. He was a great athlete, with an incredible eye, but he was matched with an obsession to win. No sugar, no shortcuts.

But the obsession, passion, focus whatever that was, it was his major talent. To take himself from an outstanding player, to the one you had to dismiss.

He made himself great through work, the fierceness of his belief, and just wanting to win. It wasn’t always pretty, or in a straight line. But when you believe you have a higher purpose, you walk through barriers, and some of them might be other people.

And Kohli will leave a legacy to the five-day game. Before him, Tests were in a weird space. Go back to the old editorials about how much India didn’t care about Tests. By the end of Kohli’s reign, they apparently cared almost too much. It hurt him to lose, not just a game, but even a moment. He was a cricketer in constant conflict, enemies within and without. So focused on how to better himself, he almost didn’t understand the players he led. If he could will this, why couldn’t they?

It didn’t make him a bad captain, nor the changer of Indian success that he was hailed for. He had a great team, and he gave them a purpose. His purpose. So any shortcomings he had were often masked by the fact that he knew what he wanted his team to do, and so did every one of his players.

Kohli’s trajectory moved things. Not only did India take Tests seriously, but there were other things that his aura moved. Things like the Champions Trophy and the Olympics are legacies of his fame and his ability to shape the world around him. He was also at the forefront of the player fan clubs we see online now. Cricket was about nations and teams. Now, like other sports, it’s becoming home to the individual. Sachin Tendulkar, Don Bradman and WG Grace were about that advertising money, but somehow Kohli is the first cricketer as a brand. A logo that lives.

Some of these changes happened around him, but some were supercharged because of Virat Kohli – he changed cricket.

But within that he was a performer. At all times we were kept abreast of who he may or may not like. On the ground, it’s like the TV producers have ten extra cameras just to make sure you don’t miss out on any microexpression or moments of rare stillness. Yet, we rarely saw what those reactions were about, who was he pointing, speaking or yelling at. No one knows. It was like a movie where the director forgot to get the reverse shots. Kohli was the only story that mattered.

As a batter, he never missed a chance to drive a ball. It was like an impulsive twitch, and no full delivery could go unpunished. Others left the ball, or dead-batted from a length, but there was Kohli still waging war with the channel. Trying to bend cricket to his skills, on the up, through covers, one shot at a time.

Eventually, Jimmy Anderson would win that battle, not on his own. But by sharing the wobble ball with the world, allowing anyone with a half-decent seam to torment Kohli.

But crank that pace up and bowl fast, and Kohli goes from victim to hunter. His ability against high pace - even during the darkest wells of his career - was remarkable. The faster the pace, the better, and he had an extraordinary skill to turn the most ordinary reactive shot into an attack for runs.

He was also a great player of spin, for a time. Until 2021, he dominated it basically every year. In fact, he will end Tests averaging nearly 60 against the turning ball. However, that all changed massively when India switched their home pitches. How many great players have to survive a planned system to make their lives harder?

And the final thing that brings down his average is playing on too long. He thought he could pull this back. How do you tell a man who has believed in himself this much - and made it happen - that this is the time it won’t work?

He was right to have faith, but that became a delusion.

Kohli seemed to believe he was only ever a cover drive away from the old Virat. That he would handle the savagely spun-off break just by mind bullets. Yes, he was moving slightly worse, and getting on. But that desire, focus, and single-mindedness would eventually win, like it always had.

But it didn’t. And so his Test batting legacy is a muddle of peaks and troughs, of innings that wowed the world and almost half a decade of decline.

Through it all was the passion and hunger. Like the great competitors, Kohli was as angry in success as in failure. He didn’t enjoy his bowlers taking wickets, he violently exploded for them. Everything was always on the verge of agony and ecstasy.

And so from a runs point of view, he ends broken. Not many great players finish like this, a shadow of themselves, fighting for scraps, trying to stay relevant. But the fire was still there, even if the runs were not. He was being judged against himself, his peak - one of the highest summits our sport has seen - which meant the slide was worse.

But it also shows you something about Kohli. There is a Latin saying, Frangas non flectas. You may break me, but never bend me. Like all of Kohli’s career, he was going to win or lose. There was never really a middle ground. He was binary in cricket, and the same in personality.

You were not supposed to think he was okay, he was there to despise or laud. The rest of the middle ground was not for him.

The Australian media once compared him to Donald Trump. And as he said once, “I know you guys hate me, and I like that”.

Yet for someone about the wins, his legacy is perhaps more about the visual. He was a visceral batter, you felt and smelt his runs. They linger. Even his wickets do. Sometimes, even he did; a Kohli dismissal could be followed by a look that he simply did not understand how this mortal could defeat him.

This wasn’t polite, skillful batting. It wasn’t stoicism. It was a flexed, tattooed, gym bulging muscle. His own creation, lean and angry. Yes, he doesn’t exist without Indian legends. And there were elements of Viru, Sunny, Sourav, and Sachin in him. But he was his own man, his own one-man generation.

Flipping the bird and enjoying the fight.

As for memories, there are a lot. I was lucky enough for a time to travel around the world and watch him bat. But the one that will never leave me is Adelaide, for Australia’s first Test after the death of Phil Hughes.

Cricket was an open, weeping wound, and no one knew how to handle it. There was a moral dilemma about bouncers, and the world was watching Australians cry.

The sport needed to be reminded of what the sport was, and the best way to remember was someone who had played through the tragedy of his own father’s passing. When Mitchell Johnson hit Kohli on the head, cricket gasped, but he batted. He had been shot before, and would again.

And instead, he hit back. The match could have ended in a memorial for Hughes. Instead, it was a great Test played in his honour. It was Kohli who kept taking us back to the contest. Seemingly scoring every last Indian run to ensure that Australia had to win it. To take it from him.

By the MCG Test, this series was about him and Australia. A relationship that few countries ever have with an opposition player. It wouldn’t be far off to say Kohli was Australian-like. But that wasn’t an accident: your major enemy is what ends up defining you.

By Boxing Day the Indians sang “We’re so rich it’s unbelievable” while the MCG chanted back, “Kohli is a wanker.” People swore at him, he swore back. His movie star partner looks on. How can you watch that and think this is your grandfather’s India?

Virat Kohli was passionate and angry. He played his career this way. For better, for worse. We felt every single movement of it. A career played loud. We heard him. The players did. The fans as well. And when he ran out of people to scream to, he went at the stumps.

There is something so Virat Kohli about him screaming at inanimate objects, yet still broadcasting to the world. That was Kohli, explosive competitiveness, and almost pure belief. It was probably not a combination that was meant to get to 10,000 runs. Maybe it had to explode before that.

Virat Kohli was a Test star. When they explode in space, they often leave a black hole.