Kohli and Test cricket gave each other their best

Now I feel old, man. Virat Kohli has run out of the fight to play Test cricket.

Virat Kohli.

I never imagined a day would come when Virat Kohli would wake up, decide to meet the selectors, and tell them that his body, mind, heart and spirit were not giving him enough to be able to play Test cricket to his standards anymore.

Test cricket. The format he lived for. Anyone who has seen Kohli play knew it would take something extraordinary to take him away from "the quiet grind, the long days, the small moments that no one sees but that stay with you forever". What a beautiful farewell note he has written. Only father time could dim Kohli's boundless enthusiasm and love for Test cricket.

Feel old yet?

All through my writing career, I have been certain of one thing: the fight in Kohli, especially for Test cricket. It has been the one constant in my time of covering Indian cricket. Don't get me wrong, he has not been the only one with the fight for Test cricket, but not everyone is blessed with all the attributes required to live every minute of the Test cricket they play: natural physical strength, combativeness, ability to understand and fine-tune a good-enough technique, and the sheer love for Test cricket that makes you work on everything else, that makes success in Test cricket an obsession, a non-negotiable.

I have seen and felt this energy and fight across the world. I experienced it first-hand long before Kohli played Test cricket. This was even before he had unleashed his competitive side in the Under-19 World Cup final when India scored just 159 and he took offence at the South African players' premature dropping of the guard. He was not even a regular in a Delhi team that included Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Aakash Chopra, Shikhar Dhawan, Mithun Manhas and Rajat Bhatia.

Delhi were playing Maharashtra in this small hill town of Nagothane in late 2007. This was an Australia tour selection audition for Sehwag and Chopra. Sehwag was proving his fitness, Chopra his worth, and the Delhi batting was too packed to include Kohli in the XI.

The Delhi nets were a daunting place, what with all these stalwarts, and Manoj Prabhakar in the coaching staff. The loud laughter from the nets looks and sounds like fun and games from the outside, but it is a seriously competitive place where every newcomer must earn their respect. "These days even Kohli is blocking," Prabhakar was heard saying when Kohli defended a ball in the nets. Cue laughter all around. What is a 19-year-old kid to make of it? Isn't he supposed to work on his defence in Ranji nets? He hit the next ball for a six, and went back to defending.

There weren't many lodging options, and we all ended up in the same resort. After a day's play, with nowhere else to go, a few Delhi youngsters ended up with us in the table tennis room. None of us was playing seriously. Until I happened to beat Kohli. Even in a casual, almost joke of a table tennis match, this 19-year-old couldn't bear losing to a 24-year-old journalist he was never going to be in competition with.

By all accounts Kohli is a chill kinda guy outside cricket. I don't know him off the field, but everybody says he is funny, an exceptional mimic, and has interests outside the game.

Once the cricket switch was flicked on, though, the lack of chill was something to behold. And it extended to every activity within cricket. Kohli couldn't help but compete. He had to be the 'est: the best, the fastest, the loudest, the coolest, the funniest, even the nastiest when nasties were needed. And he had this special ability to take you along on the ride. Not just the players who felt drawn to rallying with him, but those watching and living the game through him.

My quintessential visual memory of Kohli the Test cricketer is not from his batting or catching. It's him at second slip, living every ball bowled by his fast bowlers. In that brief moment after the ball was played, you could look at Kohli and tell what had happened. The little hop if the ball was good. Asking the crowd to cheer when the bowling felt flat. If the edge was taken, he wouldn't wait for the catch to be completed. He would start running towards the bowler, passing very close to the batter. His sculpted arms swinging in celebration.

Kohli would compete anywhere, anytime. If any opponent's celebration went out of the ordinary, he would outdo them when the time was right. If someone sledged him, he would unleash his fury on them when they batted. When the drunk barrackers in Sydney tried to bully him, he flipped them the bird. When there were calls to drop him when the seniors were failing more than he was, he expressed his anguish at the injustice. When he failed against the seaming ball in England, he didn't go into a shell; he became intent on meeting the ball even earlier. Even press conferences were a competition. Even when he was injured during the 2016-17 Border-Gavaskar Trophy, he kept on fighting from the viewing area. Even as recently as his last Test series, Kohli was beefing with a debutant.

Perhaps nobody knows better than Kohli that batters have limited agency in Test cricket, but his competitiveness made him must-see at all times. Neither spectators nor the opposition could take their eye off him. Even when he was not at his best, Kohli's wicket brought the biggest celebration from the opposition. Even with a glaring limitation during his last few years, just his presence meant they were in a fight. By being in this aroused, hyper-charged state all the time, Kohli brought the best out of both teams, and elevated the spectacle of Test cricket.

It is ultimately a sport of runs and wickets, but Kohli's presence went beyond. Anyone who watched him felt that energy. The crowds danced to his tune. They hung on to every gesture. He was their conductor, they his orchestra.

It was impossible not to be touched by Kohli's energy. I have been inspired by it. From him I have learnt that it is not about the choice you make, it is about how honestly and committedly you follow through with it. That it can be crippling if you fret on choices, whose success or failure depends on circumstances you can't accurately predict. That when you look back, you look back not at what you decided to do but how committed you were to doing the thing you chose to do.

The relentless pursuit of 20 wickets that asked more of the batters, the insistence on a certain coach that turned the whole fraternity against him for a while, the challenging pitches at home that denied him an average of 50, the team selections - you could argue about their merit, but you could never question his commitment to any of his choices. He never second-guessed himself.

Kohli didn't court instant success. On his first Test tour, West Indies bounced him out, making him question if he belonged. There were holes in his game, but his sheer will and obsession fashioned a highly successful Test batter out of him. Even at his best, most of Kohli's greatest hundreds came in defeats: twin tons in Adelaide in 2014 to Centurion, Edgbaston and Perth in 2018. He suffered many a heartbreak - from Adelaide 2014 to the two South Africa tours he captained in to the 2018 tour of England - but because he had this ultimate commitment to Test cricket he would bounce back every time and lead the team to more wins than any India captain did. Sachin Tendulkar is the only Indian cricketer with more Test wins than Kohli.

Even in his last act as a Test cricketer, Kohli has reiterated the high regard he held Test cricket in. The selectors told him they were going to take him to England. Two relatively easy home series were to follow. He could have easily hung around and completed 10,000 runs. A farewell series at home to boot. His love for Test cricket, though, is purer than that. The moment he realised he was not able to rouse himself to give this format his best, he retired. Test cricket deserved nothing less than his best. It gave Kohli its best in return.

May everyone find their equivalent of what Test cricket meant to Kohli.