The 29-year-old Indian skipper Virat Kohli deserves Kudos for becoming the fastest to complete 10,000 ODI runs during the second ODI of the five-match series against West Indies. This reveals the fact that the way Kohli looks after himself and the way he works on his game is really unbelievable.
India’s commendable fight back was a tremendous confidence-booster for a side. Overall, Kohli is now the 13th cricketer and only the fifth Indian to go past the 10,000-run barrier. It now seems that his enormous and almost insatiable appetite for runs seems to be a never-ending process. In this era, he has symbolized India’s cricketing ambitions after the retirements of some of the greatest Cricketers. There are a very few players whose mere presence on the crease instills a lot of confidence, both in the dressing room as well as amongst the supporters in the stand. It is said that challenges are a part and parcel of sport, and the best overcome it. Kohli did that in the past with some seemingly insurmountable odds in sight. He is a big match player. With his consistent performance, he produced many memorable moments in cricket and helped India to win many matches. Kohli has been consistent over the years and his aggressive nature is great for the game. The kind of cricket that he plays in past few years has time and again proved the mantle and has reinstalled the confidence among the supporters and cricket fans. He has earned plaudits from all quarters for his swashbuckling batting and now the fans and the critics are seeing him as the next Sachin Tendulkar. He understands how he is supposed to bat in different wickets to score runs. His biggest plus point is that he takes everything as a challenge and wants to contribute in each and every game. His every knock was applauded from every quarter of the cricket world. Every time he walks into bat he carries the hopes of a billion surrounded people who look to him as the sole hope in a nation rounded by gloom, and despair.
Ricky Ponting has in his book At Close of Play has rightly written that “He has got presence and is one of that new breed of Indian players who are supremely confident and he has the game to back it up… I think in two or three years his name will be up there as one of the best in Test match cricket.” Most of the cricketers today do not know how to stand in longer format after the arrival of T20, but Kohli suits any format of the game. He has the capacity to bat for a long time and it’s the hunger to perform, his willingness to take up the challenge that sets him apart. Invariably, the pressure comes on Kohli, though he has relished the task of delivering each time he is required to step up. There are batsmen, good and great but Kohli is beyond them all. Kohli is a true modern superstar; a young man who has touched dizzying peaks and is hungry for more in the years ahead. The time has come when a collective effort is needed from Team India with batsmen and bowlers needing to fire in tandem in future. There are many who say Sachin Tendulkar was the symbol of a growing India, waiting to take on the world. Kohli symbolises a generation that is confident of its position on the global platform. Kohli has always shown his determination, hard work, and the thirst and there is no doubt that he called the next Master Blaster.
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
