The finals of the World Test Championship commence this Friday and both India and New Zealand have announced their 15 member squads. Virat Kohli would obviously be captaining the Indian side. The question that worries the Indian fans is that whether Kohli will finally score his Seventy-First international hundred. His last international century came in November 2019 in Kolkata, a 136 against Bangladesh.
There is no denying the fact that Virat Kohli has been India’s ultimate run-scoring machine in the last decade. He has scored centuries at such a ferocious rate that the impossible feat of surpassing Tendulkar’s hundred 100s seems very much possible. At just 32 years old, he has an unthinkable 70 international hundred. Therefore, no century in the last 2 years has left the Indian cricket fan worried.
It is not that Kohli has had a drop in form. He has continued to play the crucial innings and saved the team in challenging situations. His averages across formats are evidence that he has been among the runs. It is just that he has been unable to convert his 70s and 80s into the daddy hundreds that he did so effortlessly a couple of years back.\
In the past year, Kohli scored 74 in Adelaide in the first test against Australia, 72 and 62 against England in the first and second test. In ODIs, he played a match-defining 89 in the second match against Australia in SCG, followed that with a 63 in Canberra, and then against England scored 56 and 66 in the first two ODIs. It is therefore abundantly clear that lack of form is not a factor in his case. Any other player with this kind of number would be celebrated as a champion of the game. However, Kohli is not any other player. He has set such lofty standards for himself that when he does not live up to them, his fans are left disappointed.
Hence, the first game of the upcoming season which also happens to be the WTC finals holds incredible relevance. Kohli himself, and the entire nation, would want him to break this unpleasant jinx and notch his 71st hundred. The innings, other than having immense personal importance, would also be particularly significant in the context of the situation. This is the first WTC finals and both teams would want to create history by winning it. New Zealand would be nursing their jolted egos since their ill-fated 2019 World Cup loss to England. They will be coming into the game with fierce determination to lose their newly christened “chokers” tag.
One must remember that the WTC finals will be played in Southampton, England and the country holds a pivotal place in Kohli’s sporting career. The last time he toured England in 2018, the story was about his spectacular redemption from his 2014 tour. The 2014 tour was the first-ever major blip in his international career when he amassed 134 runs at an average of 13.50.
Going into the 2018 tour, there was a lot of conjecture around whether Kohli would be able to reign on the demons of his previous tour. He went onto score 593 runs at an ungodly average of 59.30 and finished as the highest run-getter of the series. Therefore, it would not be a stretch to expect him to go into the WTC finals and subsequently the England test series with all guns blazing and bring an end to his century drought which has probably been the biggest challenge ever since the 2014 England tour.
