Ahead of the team’s planned June five-match visit to England, India veteran Virat Kohli revealed on Monday that he would be retiring from Test cricket with immediate effect. “It’s been 14 years since I first wore the baggy blue in Test cricket. Honestly, I never imagined the journey this format would take me on. It’s tested me, shaped me, and taught me lessons I’ll carry for life,” Kohli wrote on his Instagram handle. Kohli ended the posted with “#269, signing off”.
After 14 years and 123 Test matches, the 36-year-old Kohli ends his illustrious red-ball career. On June 20, 2011, at Kingston, the Delhi batsman made his Test debut against the West Indies. In the ensuing ten years, from 2010 to 2019, Kohli became India’s most successful batter. With 7202 runs at an average of 54.97 and 27 hundreds, the most of any hitter at the time, Kohli was the third-highest Test run scorer of all time.
But after COVID in 2020, the India No. 4’s stock plummeted, scoring just 2028 runs in 68 innings, with three hundreds and nine fifties. Interestingly, out of the 24 Test hitters who have scored at least 2000 runs since 2020, Kohli has the lowest average of 30.72.
Kohli will likely be remembered as one of India’s best hitters in the format, despite his sudden choice to end his red-ball career. With 9230 runs in 210 innings, Kohli is fourth among Indian batsmen all-time, only surpassed by the great trinity of Sunil Gavaskar (10,122), Rahul Dravid (13,265), and Sachin Tendulkar (15,921), who all amassed 9230 runs at an average of 46.85.
After MS Dhoni stepped down as Test captain in 2014, Kohli successfully led India for eight years. The most successful Indian Test captain in history, Kohli guided his team to 40 Test match victories in 68 appearances as captain. The only international captains with more Test victories are Steve Waugh (41), Ricky Ponting (48), and Graeme Smith (53). As captain, Kohli amassed an incredible 5864 runs in 113 innings, the fourth-best total in Test history, and he also dominated with the bat. As a Test captain, only Smith (25) of South Africa amassed more hundreds than Kohli (20).
Even though Kohli opened the 2024 Border-Gavaskar Trophy with a century against Australia in Perth, he finished the tour with a dismal record of 193 runs as a string of caught-behind dismissals marred his play. Kohli went out to deliveries outside off stump seven times during the trip, accounting for eight of his dismissals.
Speaking at a recent event about the mental pressures after the recent Test failures, Kohli had said, “Once you start taking on the energy and the disappointment from the outside, then you start burdening yourself way more… And then you start thinking about things, like ‘I’ve got two or three days left on this tour, I need to make an impact now’. And you start getting more desperate. That’s something I’ve surely experienced in Australia as well.” Elaborating on that thought, he had said, “Because I got a good score in the first Test. I thought, ‘right, let’s go’. There’s going to be another big series for me. It doesn’t turn out that way. For me, it’s just about the acceptance of ‘okay fine, this is what happened. I’m going to be honest with myself. Where do I want to go? What are my energy levels like’.”
