By Bharath Ramaraj
Venue – The grand theatre that is the Melbourne Cricket Ground
Match – India versus Pakistan
Contest – Haris Rauf against Virat Kohli
Just for a moment, Rauf has taken a flight to a different zone, where his thought process is clear and concise. The fast bowler is digging it short, twinning slower short deliveries with quicker offerings. His idea is to force the two batters at the crease to target the longer boundary, which is around 84 metres away. The equation is an improbable 28 off 8 balls and it seems near-impossible even for Kohli, one of the finest finishers in limited-overs cricket.
And then, it happens. Kohli has decided enough is enough and cracks an iconic six down the ground. Even if you take a piece of paper and write about a thousand superlative adjectives, they will perhaps not be enough to describe that one shot. How do you explain a shot where a batter has whipped a short-of-a-length slower one downtown, with his hands ending up somewhere behind him? It is also hard to believe that his feet and head stayed in that one particular shot for as long as they did. Kohli clubbed another six next ball and India eventually won a cliff-hanger.
Hours have turned into days, and more than five months have passed since then. But Kohli’s knock still echoes in the mind. More so, his sheer self-belief to shut out everything that was happening around him. The stadium was jam-packed, with 90,293 fans shouting and celebrating every single dismissal or shot. Pakistan’s best bowler of the day was bowling the penultimate over, with his side clearly having the upper hand. More importantly, it was the mother of all contests – India versus Pakistan. Most would have crumbled under the pressure. Kohli, though, was an exception to the rule. He somehow remembered that he needed to target the relatively shorter straight boundary, and subsequently executed the shot to perfection.
If someone who has hardly watched cricket reads through the first few paragraphs, they might feel that Kohli had played in some rarefied zone right through the innings. In reality, at the drinks break, he was wallowing through a slew of emotions. “I still can’t make any sense of it, and that is a very honest admission,” he said at a Sports Conclave hosted by Abhishek Ganguly, Managing Director of PUMA India and Southeast Asia. “A lot of people have tried to ask me, ‘what were you thinking? what did you plan?’ (and) I have no answer. The fact of the matter is, I was under so much pressure that my mind had shut off completely by the 12th or 13th over.
“I was going through what I was going through, then I came back in the Asia Cup. I was playing well. And then I felt like, ‘Wow! I am ready to play in this World Cup’. By the 10th over, we are 31 for 4 and I have just run Axar [Patel] out and I think I was 12 off 25 or something. And I remember Rahul bhai (Dravid) came during the break and I don’t remember what he said.
“I swear, I told him this as well, ‘I had no idea what you said, I was zoned out’. My mind was spinning so fast, this is worse than what it was before. I have spiralled down so much now that there is no coming back from here. That was my honest feeling at the halfway mark.”
Kohli’s admission just indicates that delving into the world of pressure takes us to unchartered territory. Kohli, who took a short break, had just regained a bit of his form with a hundred against Afghanistan in the Asia Cup. But in the cauldron of yet another India versus Pakistan game, he was again feeling low on confidence. It’s just that a champion athlete seems to have additional reserves in terms of mental toughness. On that night, Kohli found that little extra when he stopped thinking too much about the situation of the game and allowed his natural gifts to take over. He was back to wearing the ‘King Kohli’ suit after wearing the Mortal-Kohli costume for a while.
“Then my instincts took over,” he said. “So when I stopped thinking and planning, whatever God-given talent I had came to the surface, and then I felt like something higher was guiding me. I can’t claim that I was planning any of this… I was trying before too, but it wasn’t happening. I can still sense it, because this is such a strong experience. That is what people who saw it told me as well, ‘that we felt like it was something different’. And I’m grateful that I was in that position and it was happening through me. The lesson for me was to stop using this (brain) so much that it pushes you away from the real magic. When you go for it and decide to just play, that is when the magic happens.
“What happened that night, I can’t explain. I don’t think it can happen again, that kind of experience. Now I look back, the perfection of the scenario, no one but him (God) can present it to you. That is my honest feeling of that night.”
Just before Kohli touched upon his awe-inspiring knock at the MCG, he briefly shared his thoughts on life lessons from playing sport. The point that stands out is his love for the game. His love for the game is the reason why he trains day and night in his own workshop in order to improve by fractions and percentages. And that is at the heart of the 75 international hundreds he has collected across the three formats of the game.
“What sport taught me, and that can apply to every other walk of life is that you have to take risks,” he said. “There is nothing called a safe option. You can be safe for an amount of time but at a certain point of time, in everyone’s life, a huge amount of pressure is going to hit you, and you can’t run away from it. I haven’t met a person who can claim ‘I have had a perfect life, I have had no pressures, no situations where I had to take a call where things could have gone absolutely one way, in a negative sense, but then I came out two months later and felt like it was the best decision of my life.’
“The only option I had was to follow my heart and make a decision and not care about whether I succeed or fail. Every time I have done that, I have come out as a better person and things have turned out well. You need to be absolutely involved in what you’re doing. For me, I love playing cricket and when I love something, I give my life to it. If you’re that good at what you want to do, give your life to it. Make sure you do everything that is required to succeed, to do justice to the decision you have made. You go beyond your limits to do something that you love. The main focus is to love and go for it.”
All one can wish for is that Kohli’s love for the game continue to burn bright. And may it lead to a few more once-in-a-lifetime moments like we witnessed at the MCG.
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By Bharath Ramaraj Venue – The grand theatre that is the Melbourne Cricket Ground Match – India versus Pakistan Contest – Haris Rauf against Virat Kohli Just for a…
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