ST Picks Cricket will feel colourless without Kohli s competitiveness

The end was muted. No fist pump, no scowl, no curse. No bat up or head down, no slow walk or standing crowd. A fighting man left Test cricket gently with an Instagram post that had a trace of poetry. He wrote of “the quiet grind, the long days, the small moments” of Test matches and there was something wistful to it all. Goodbye, Charlie Brown said, “always makes my throat hurt”.

Virat Kohli has left Test cricket, a format he blew life into like a man stoking an unsteady fire. He was hardly a single-handed saviour, but with 272 million Instagram followers, and an inexhaustible spirit, he was its most persuasive evangelist. In India, once, the host broadcaster always had a camera following him.

Kohli finished with 9,230 Test runs and they were substantial. Not more than others (he makes the all-time top 20),nor the most elegant, yet each one dipped in some brew of intensity and ferocity. He brought such heat to the game you feared he might self-combust.

Retirements – he still plays one-day cricket – are sentimental occasions. We measure an athlete one last time, place him in history, use flattery to camouflage his flaws and walk back in time with him to when we were both younger. We are not just remembering their lives but ours. A grand waltz is over and it feels mournful.

The exceptional athlete exerts a unique pull, offering a quality which lures us to the arena. Like Michael Jordan’s flight, or Cristiano Ronaldo’s swagger, or Simone Biles’ explosiveness. With Kohli, for this writer, it was his competitiveness.

Kohli could start a scrap in a nunnery. He wasn’t thin-skinned, he appeared to have none. Raw energy flowed from him. Once chubby, later slim, he seemed as unyielding as rebar.