Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli player profile

India has given to the world many a great cricketer but perhaps none as ambitious as Virat Kohli. To meet his ambition, Kohli employed the technical assiduousness of Sachin Tendulkar and fitness that was in the league of top athletes in the world, not just cricketers. As a result, Kohli became the most consistent all-format accumulator of his time, making jaw-dropping chases look easy, and finding, in his own words, the safest possible way to score runs. Plenty of them.

This ambition transferred seamlessly to his captaincy: he demanded more than ever of his bowlers especially the quick ones, often sacrificed a batter for bowling depth, and led India to a long stay at No. 1 in Test rankings and a first-ever series win in Australia. India won 40 out of the 68 Tests in which Kohli led, making him the fourth-most successful captain in the world, behind Graeme Smith, Ricky Ponting and Steven Waugh.

Kohli scored Test hundreds in and against every country he played, other than in Bangladesh. He absolutely smashed records for number of matches taken to reach eight, nine, ten and eleven thousand ODI runs, and became the first batter to score 50 hundreds in one-day internationals - getting to the milestone in the 2023 World Cup semi-final, in the presence of Tendulkar, the man whose record he broke.

Between 2016 and 2018, Kohli scored 3596 runs in 35 Tests at an average of 66.59, with 14 hundreds and eight fifties in 58 innings, with the 2018 tour of England being a high point. There was a dip thereafter - his average, over 55 at its peak after he scored his career-best of 254 against South Africa in Pune in 2019, slipped to around 32 over the last two years of his Test career. When he scored 100 not out in Perth in 2024, it was his first Test century in over a year. He announced his retirement from the format six months later, shortly before the squad for the tour of England was to be picked.

While an IPL trophy has been missing from Kohli's cabinet, he is a world champion multiple times over, having captained India to the 2008 Under-19 World Cup title and winning four more ICC trophies with the senior side: the 50-over World Cup in 2011, Champions Trophies in 2013 and 2025, and the 2024 T20 World Cup, where he scored 76 in the final.

When he burst onto the scene, Kohli was a precocious talent with a cover drive to kill for. He was destined to be India's next big batter as the batting greats of Tendulkar era began to retire, but Kohli wanted to be more: a cricketer whom the opposition would be in awe of, a cricketer whose presence would raise the intensity of the contest. He lived every ball, competed each moment, and made sure he had the fitness and strength to do so. He was widely credited for changing attitudes towards fitness in Indian cricket, introducing endurance tests as a criterion for selection.

He was quite simply India's most powerful captain. At the centre of every marketing campaign for Indian cricket, he also happened to lead at a time when the BCCI was run by interim administrators who knew better than to draw the ire of Indian cricket's biggest star. There was never any cause to doubt his intent: to do things that will win matches for India, which they did plenty under him.

Virat Kohli IPL factfile

- Virat Kohli is the only player in the Indian Premier League (IPL) to have played all seasons for one team: Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB)

- He was picked by RCB soon after he captained India to victory in the 2008 Under-19 World Cup and has been retained by them ever since

- Kohli is the IPL's highest run-scorer and the only one with more than 8000 runs

- He holds the record for most IPL centuries (8) as well as most runs in a season (973 runs in 2016). He has won the Orange Cap twice - in 2016 and 2024

- Kohli captained RCB full-time from 2013 to 2021 and led them to the final in the 2016 season, when they lost to Sunrisers Hyderabad

- Kohli holds the record for the most prolific partnerships in the IPL, with AB de Villiers (3123 runs) and Chris Gayle (2787 runs)

- His popularity has made RCB one of the most followed teams in the IPL, even though they haven't yet won a title