Virat Kohli as Captain: the 2016 Peak and the Fitness Reset
Virat KohliIndia9 min read
Captaincy came to Virat Kohli by accident, in Adelaide in December 2014, because MS Dhoni had injured a thumb and somebody had to lead. He made 115 in the first innings and 141 in the second, chasing 364 on the final day in a match India lost by 48 runs having been 242 for 2. India could have shut up shop for a draw. Kohli did not, and afterwards said as much. The seven years that followed were mostly an argument about whether that instinct was an asset or a liability, conducted in public, at volume.
Taking over from Dhoni, and the change in method
Dhoni returned for the next two Tests of that series and retired from the format after the Melbourne match. Kohli led at Sydney and held the job until January 2022, finishing with 68 Tests in charge and 40 wins, more than any other India captain by a clear margin. He took the white-ball captaincy in January 2017 when MS Dhoni stepped down from that too.
The method was not subtle. Kohli picked five bowlers in almost every Test he could, at home and away, on the reasoning that a batting order deep enough to save matches is a batting order that never wins them. He backed fast bowlers ahead of the extra batter in conditions where India had traditionally done the opposite. He also made a point of setting attacking fields on the fourth and fifth days when a draw was the safer outcome. India were the top-ranked Test side for most of the second half of his tenure, which was as much a product of that selection policy as of any individual's runs.
It came with costs that were obvious at the time. Five-bowler sides lose Tests they might have drawn, and India did, particularly overseas in the first two years. The tail was long enough that a middle-order collapse was rarely recoverable. Kohli's answer was that a drawn Test away from home is worth very little and that the arithmetic of a championship rewards wins, an argument that looked stubborn in 2016 and considerably better by 2019. The spin pairing of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja made it viable at home, because two frontline spinners who both bat gave him the extra bowler almost for free.
The 2016 that made him unavoidable
Then there was 2016, which stands apart even in a career of this size. In the IPL that year Kohli made 973 runs at an average of 81.1 and a strike rate of 152.0, the largest aggregate anyone has made in a franchise season. At the 2016 World T20 he was named Player of the Tournament, on the back of 82 not out from 51 balls against Australia at Mohali in a match India had to win to qualify, and 89 not out from 47 in the semi-final against West Indies at the Wankhede, which India lost.
He had done something similar two years earlier. At the 2014 World T20 in Bangladesh he scored 319 runs, the most in the tournament, made 72 not out in the semi-final against South Africa and 77 in a final that Sri Lanka won. The difference in 2016 was that the white-ball form was happening at the same time as a run of Test scoring that nobody had predicted from him five years earlier.
The Mohali innings is the one that best explains the reputation he had by then. India needed 161 to reach the semi-finals, lost three wickets inside the first half of the innings, and had to complete the chase against an attack bowling to a plan. Kohli finished unbeaten on 82 from 51 balls and the target was reached inside the final over. There was no phase in the innings that looked like an assault. That was the point of it.
Four consecutive series with a Test double hundred
| Series | Venue | Date | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| West Indies, away | North Sound | July 2016 | 200 |
| New Zealand, home | Indore | October 2016 | 211 |
| England, home | Mumbai | December 2016 | 235 |
| Bangladesh, home | Hyderabad | February 2017 | 204 |
No batter had made a double hundred in four consecutive Test series before. What the table understates is the function those innings served. Each of them was a first-innings score that gave India's bowlers three and a half days and a lead, and India won all four of those series. Kohli finished with seven Test double hundreds in total, more than any other India batter, and every one of them was scored while he was captain.
The fitness reset, and what it did to the dressing room
The physical change is easy to date from photographs and harder to date from records, but the outline is well established. Kohli overhauled his diet and training around 2012, cutting out most of what a young Delhi cricketer eats, and then built the regime up steadily over the following three years. By 2016 he was among the fittest players in international cricket and the difference showed most in the second hour of a chase and the fourth day of a Test, which are exactly the situations his record is built on.
He then made it institutional. From 2017 the yo-yo endurance test became a selection requirement for the India squad, with a published pass mark, and players who failed it were left out regardless of runs or wickets. That was a genuine departure. Indian teams had accommodated unfit match-winners for decades. Several established names missed selection on the standard, and the policy attracted a good deal of criticism at the time, some of it fair. Its legacy is visible in the fielding, where India stopped being a side that conceded twenty runs an innings in the ring, and in the pace bowling, where the workloads became sustainable.
The criticism was worth hearing. A single endurance test measures one attribute, and a wicketkeeper or a wrist spinner does not need the same aerobic base as an opening bowler. Applying one number to eleven different jobs was crude. The counter-argument is that a crude standard consistently applied changed behaviour faster than a sophisticated one would have, because every player in the domestic system could see exactly what was being asked and had a number to train towards. Within a few years the test had stopped being a story, which is usually the sign that a standard has been absorbed rather than abandoned.
There is a straightforward performance case for it as well. Kohli's own scoring in the last ten overs of an ODI chase, and his ability to run hard through the middle overs on a humid evening after fielding for fifty, are not separable from the training. The chase-master record and the fitness record are the same record described twice.
A fast bowling attack, and Australia in 2018-19
The most substantial thing built during the captaincy was a pace attack that could take twenty wickets abroad. Jasprit Bumrah was moved into the Test side in 2018 having played only limited-overs cricket for India. Mohammed Shami went from a bowler used in short bursts to one trusted with long spells on flat pitches. The rotation policy that kept four or five fast bowlers available for a whole overseas series had not existed before.
The return on it came in the summer of 2018-19, when India won a Test series in Australia for the first time, and again on the following tour when Ajinkya Rahane led a depleted side to a series win after India had been bowled out for 36 in Adelaide. Kohli was not there for the second one, having gone home after the first Test, but the squad he had spent five years insisting on was. That is the strongest argument in his favour as a captain: the side won a series in Australia without him, using players he had selected, on a template he had set.
Nine years of finals without a trophy
Set against that is the record that gets quoted most often. Kohli captained India in three ICC knockout campaigns that ended in defeat and never won a global tournament in charge. The 2017 Champions Trophy final was the heaviest of them: Pakistan made 338 for 4 and India were bowled out for 158, a 180-run margin that remains the largest in any one-day final. The 2019 World Cup ended in a semi-final defeat to New Zealand at Old Trafford, in a match India spent most of an evening losing from 5 for 3. The inaugural World Test Championship final in 2021, also against New Zealand, went the same way, on a Southampton pitch and in weather that suited the side with the better seam attack, which on that occasion was not India.
The last of them was the 2021 T20 World Cup, by which point he had already announced he would give up the T20 captaincy afterwards. India lost to Pakistan by ten wickets and to New Zealand by eight and went out in the group stage. Whether a captain should be judged on four knockout matches spread over five years is a reasonable question. It was not the question being asked at the time.
Leading Royal Challengers, 2013 to 2021
The franchise captaincy ran alongside all of it and produced even less silverware. Kohli led Royal Challengers from 2013 until the end of the 2021 season without winning the competition. The closest was 2016, when the side reached the final at their own ground and lost by eight runs. The worst was 2017, a season in which Bangalore were dismissed for 49 at Eden Gardens, still the lowest total in IPL history, and Kohli himself batted in only ten innings because of a shoulder injury.
Nine years is an unusually long tenure for a franchise captain with no title, and it was sustained by the relationship between the player and the city rather than by results. When he stepped down he stayed at the club, which is not what usually happens, and the two trophies that eventually arrived came with somebody else leading.
Giving it up, in three instalments
The captaincy ended in stages over fourteen months. He announced before the 2021 T20 World Cup that he would stop leading in that format and would also give up the Royal Challengers job. In December 2021 he was replaced as ODI captain, a decision announced by the selectors rather than by him, and the sequence of public statements that followed made clear it had not been agreed. He resigned the Test captaincy in January 2022, immediately after the series defeat in South Africa.
What followed was the leanest period of his career, and it is difficult to separate the two. He went almost three years without an international hundred, and the noise around that coincided almost exactly with the months in which he had stopped being captain. The runs came back in the Asia Cup of 2022 and have not really stopped since.
The last act of the T20 career was well judged. He made 76 from 59 balls in the 2024 T20 World Cup final against South Africa, in an innings that began at 34 for 3 and set up a total India defended by seven runs. He was named player of the match and retired from the format at the presentation ceremony, which is a rare piece of timing in a sport where most careers end with a selection meeting.
What the captaincy left behind
The fairest summary is that Kohli changed what an India side was expected to look like more than he changed what it won. The fitness standards, the five-bowler Test template and the assumption that India travel to win rather than to survive all outlasted him, and they were adopted by teams he was no longer picking. Anyone tracing the arc of cricket in India over the past fifteen years runs into that inheritance repeatedly.
The trophy cabinet from those years is close to empty and the record book from them is not. Both things are true, and the second one is the more unusual.