Kohli the Test captain's legacy lies in focus on pace attack, fitness culture

Looking beyond all the high praise and high-strung emotions that marked the day of Virat Kohli’s retirement from Tests, it’s also time to take a closer look at the overall legacy of  Kohli in the longer format of the game.

Despite having a shorter Test career than some of the other batting legends of India, including Little Master Sachin Tendulkar, it has to be admitted that the brash kid from West Delhi had left huge footprints both as a batter and captain.

An appearance in 123 Tests over 11 years is significantly less than the mighty Tendulkar, who has all conceivable batting records under his belt in both Tests and ODIs in a career spanning over 24 years. The second-highest Indian run-getter in Tests, Rahul Dravid, has had a career of 15 years to boast the second-highest number of centuries (36) among the Indian greats.

Kohli, on the other hand, was more a man in a hurry —but significantly, did not let the pressures of Test captaincy bog down his batsmanship.

In fact, his best years as a batter came when he was a captain in all formats, with a golden period between 2016 and 2018, during which he had scored 3,596 runs in 35 Tests at a whopping average of 66.59 with 14 centuries. He was also the first player to score four double centuries in consecutive Test series. 

Diehard Kohli fans may rue the fact that he stopped some way short (9230 runs) of the 10,000-run mark, like some of his illustrious predecessors, but he had stamped his class and authority with some other remarkable batting landmarks and captaincy feats. Add with it was his philosophy of shifting to pace bowling as the fulcrum of the Indian attack – which saw the birth of a feared four-pronged pace attack, a water tight fitness and dietary culture among his teammates – and one gets the bigger picture.

He has the most centuries by an Indian captain (20 out of his 30 three-figure innings came during captaincy), the highest number of double centuries (seven) among Indians - apart from being the third-fastest centurion globally to reach 7,000 Test runs.

When conjuring up images of most successful Test captains in modern cricket, the cricket romantics may gloat about a Graeme Smith – who was thurst into captaincy at barely 21 years, the inscrutable Steve Waugh while the names of Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Sourav Ganguly are discussed in the same breath among most successful Indian skippers.

However, Kohli is the most successful Indian skipper with 40 wins from 68 Tests and yes, the first-ever Indian skipper to complete a Test series win in Australia in 2018-2019.  He is also the only Asian captain to win Tests in SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand & Australia) countries. The big prize of Tests, the World Test Championship (WTC), however eluded him when India were pipped by New Zealand in the 2021 final in Southampton.

Incidentally, batting was not the only area of strength in which Kohli led by example – it was also the fitness culture which he inculcated in the team. Speaking about how he made Indian cricketers embrace it, Shankar Basu, erstwhile fitness trainer of the national team now engaged with Royal Challengers Bangalore said in an interview after his tenure: ‘’Among the Indian cricketers, lifting weights in a scientific manner really worked well with Virat. Made him stronger.’’

The introduction of the demanding Yo-Yo test, a takeaway from football, which saw some of the big names flunking the test and missing out on selection - also had a major buy-in from the regime of Kohli and Ravi Shastri.

It's ultimately Indian cricket which reaped the benefits from the new ethos of the Kohli–Shastri regime.