Captain Kohli, the ‘Tiger' that burnt bright

Time of India

13-05-2025

STRIPES... (Above) India captain Pataudi (fourth from right) leads his team for a practice session ahead of the Lord's Test against England in 1967. Photo credit: Getty Images
"Let's give them 60 overs of hell!'
Years down the line, when historians will revisit Indian Test cricket in the 21st century,
Virat Kohli
's war cry at the Lord's in 2021 will ring in their ears.
That London summer afternoon defined the Kohli-way — a new era of self-belief when India refused to throw in the towel even when the chips were down.
The team, after a miraculous ninth-wicket partnership between Jasprit Bumrah and
Mohammed Shami
on the fifth morning, could have veered towards the safer confines of an honourable draw.
Kohli, Ishant and teammates celebrate an England wicket during the 2021 Lord's Test. (Photo credit: Getty Images)
But the captain didn't believe in settling for a draw, even while playing overseas. The 151-run win on that day was the highest point for Kohli the captain — arguably a more remarkable figure than Kohli the batter, at least in Test cricket.
That day, the basis of that confidence to push for a win at Lord's lay in the belief that Kohli had in his pace quartet of Bumrah, Shami, Mohammed Siraj and
Ishant Sharma
. It was an attack that was meticulously curated by Kohli and coach Ravi Shastri, with the help of bowling coach Bharath Arun.
In many ways, Kohli's decision to rely on out-and-out pace was a leaf out of a decision that the young Mansur Ali Khan
Pataudi
took as captain in the 1960s, to rely on a magnificent battery of spinners to churn out results.
In Bishan Singh Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna and BS Chandrasekhar, Pataudi had a supremely gifted trio. S Venkataraghavan, who made his debut in 1965, was made a regular part of the spin attack as India played with four spinners for the first time at Edgbaston in 1967.
Playing in tandem, the quartet restricted England to 298 and 203, only to be let down by the batters. But they laid a marker that was to define Indian cricket for the next decade, aptly summed up by Kapil Dev in Tim Wigmore's Test Cricket: A History: 'Almost every Indian bowler in that era wanted to be a spinner.'
Half a century later, in 2018, Kohli took the call to play four pacers in Perth. Much like Pataudi's Edgbaston experience, India lost that Test despite the skipper scoring a magnificent century, but India had well and truly taken a step in a different direction.
As Prasanna and Bedi have insisted that 'playing under Tiger was no strain', the likes of Ishant Sharma and Shami flourished under Kohli. But the captain's biggest contribution will be the 'Kohinoor' he gifted to Indian Test cricket — Bumrah, the pace parallel of the maverick leggie Chandrasekhar.
The slinger was superb in white-ball cricket, but no one believed he could last the rigours of Test cricket till Kohli and Shastri decided otherwise. The duo nurtured him and introduced him to Test cricket in South Africa in 2018. It would prove the birth of the 'Bradman of pace bowling' — termed by Adam Gilchrist — as India took their first step towards world domination in red-ball cricket, culminating in two back-to-back series wins in Australia.
Unifying a team for a common cause
Pataudi, as Indian captain, had brought in a unification code to a largely disjointed team. 'Our side was dominated by players from the West and South and it was difficult for a Punjabi like myself to be accepted. But it was Tiger who gave us the feeling of Indian-ness,' Bedi says in Wigmore's book.
Fifty years down the line, Kohli, too, tried to unify the team through a common code — fitness. He learnt early that to excel in 21st century cricket, fitness had to be of a different level. He brought changes to his lifestyle and diet to himself become the lean, mean machine.
He also tried to instill the same in his team, to follow a similar mantra. It meant that the envelope was pushed. If the pace bowlers, on the final session of the final day, were ready to bowl 140 km/hr, a lot to do with the culture of fitness that was brought in by Kohli.
A two-hour talkathon
Kohli didn't mind the odd exchange of words with the opposition on the field, but there's one instance when his anger was channelized towards his own team. According to a member of the management, Kohli was livid with the way India capitulated in the first Test in Cape Town, chasing 208.
'Vernon Philander destroyed us with his medium-pace in the second innings, Kohli couldn't take it anymore. We never heard him speaking as harshly as he did to the team members — for about two hours on that day. He made it clear that such a performance was just not acceptable. By the time we got into the team bus, we knew something had to be changed,' a team member told TOI.
Kohli walked the talk in the next Test in Centurion with a century, albeit in a losing cause. But India won the third Test on a minefield in Johannesburg. The first step towards world domination had been taken.