Who is that madman? The one in the beard and the shades covering the zealot eyes with the never shut mouth and the furiously flailing arms, who is constantly on the cusp of combusting spontaneously?
How come he is rarely out of range of the television cameras but always just out of earshot of the stump microphones? When is he going to punch someone out there? Or be punched by someone?
Where does he find the discipline to focus the crazy energy he shows in the field on the application needed to bat for long enough to score a 50, never mind all his centuries and double centuries, and to score them in style?
That man is, of course, Virat Kohli. That much we know. As for the rest, we haven’t a clue.
You might not like it, and if you’re not Indian you probably don’t — indeed, plenty of Indians don’t — but it’s true: Kohli is cricket’s best and most followable captain. Maybe ever.
And not a half-bad player besides.
If teams get the captains they deserve — Mike Brearley’s England, Imran Khan’s Pakistanis, Steve Waugh’s Australians, Graeme Smith’s South Africans — the Indians must have done something outrageously right to end up with Kohli.
To overcome the celebrity of Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni takes some doing, but Kohli has done it: 31.8-million Twitter followers can’t be wrong.
That’s 1.1-million more than Tendulkar and 24.1-million more than Dhoni.
“In terms of his performances, he leads by example. And I mean that in all facets of the game, and off the field too. He came off very well in the background of MS Dhoni, who laid the foundation, and did things in a different way.”
That was Brian Lara in Mumbai this week, and he should know. One of cricket’s most dazzling players was put in charge of one of the game’s dullest teams, and won only 10 of his 47 Tests in almost 10 years as West Indies captain.
Lara is a shining light in a culture that has lost belief in itself and squandered its legacy.
Kohli shines as brightly as Lara did, but India’s culture is the opposite of West Indies’.
“Sachin will talk about Sunil Gavaskar being his role model,” Lara said. “But if you look at all the players now, I feel that the team in the 90s, even though they weren’t amazingly successful — the likes of Sachin, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, and what they did and stood for — it was a different sort of an Indian team coming in and moulding and trying to be successful all around the world.
“So the [current] team [are] now using those role models of the 90s, showing how good they are in various conditions around the world.“
The Indian team was maybe not the most respected team when they travelled [in the past] … But now, India are a force to reckon with anywhere they play. I believe that that stems from years of preparation and the role models who have come through.”
So Kohli deserves his team as much as they deserve him, and the same goes for the system that spawned and grew them into what they are.
This is what hurts most about SA’s series in India. The duty and diligence that Indian cricket has so obviously put into building their fine team is abjectly absent from the stale air that surrounds the South Africans.It doesn’t matter nearly as much to the game in our country that the XI who are cricket’s major meal ticket should be given every opportunity to be the best they can be.
Too many other agendas get in the way of that happening, a failing that will extract a high price sooner rather than later.
The best reason for avoiding that trap is the mad man in the beard and the shades covering the zealot eyes with the never shut mouth and the furiously flailing arms.
He’s on fire for India, and India for him.
