Virat Kohli's Heart Races with Excitement for Champions Trophy Final; Ready to Cement Unshakeable Legacy

Varun Chakravarthy is known for his unique bowling style, which combines elements of leg-spin and googly bowling techniques. Though he doesn't fit the traditional mould of a leg-spinner, he has a knack for bowling deliveries that skid through or break into the right-hander. While he does bowl the conventional leg-spinner on occasion, he primarily relies on his variations to keep the batsmen guessing.

At the ICC Academy ground on Friday night, in the ‘net’ closest to the viewing area, Chakravarthy was at work. Up against him was Virat Kohli, fresh off knocks of 100 not out and 84 in two of his last three innings in the Champions Trophy.

Kohli has fallen to leg-spin 23 times in One-Day Internationals; leg-spin has accounted for 9.43% of his 244 dismissals. As head coach Gautam Gambhir pointed out, when you play for as long as Kohli has, you will get out to different kinds of bowling, you will court different modes of outs. 9.43% is a small proportion. Until you cast your eyes on more recent statistics and find that in six of his last eight ODI innings, leg-spinners have had his number – Wanindu Hasaranga and Jeffrey Vandersay in Colombo in August, Adil Rashid twice last month in Cuttack and Ahmedabad, and Bangladesh’s Rishad Hossain and Adam Zampa of Australia in Dubai. Twice leg-before, twice caught behind, caught at point on the cut once and caught at long-on in Tuesday’s semifinal, by which time he had laid the leg-spin bogey to rest.

Australia had two leggies, Zampa and Tanveer Sangha, not so much to feast on Kohli’s fallibility against bowling of that kind as to try and make the most of the assistance the surface at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium was expected to offer. Kohli handled them with aplomb; he scored 23 off 24 balls against the experienced Zampa, 12 off nine against Sangha, playing his third ODI. 35 off 33 in all. Until he perished in trying to knock Zampa out of the park after having picked his googly, with India 40 away from victory, Kohli 16 away from a 52nd hundred. This time, the leg-spinner didn’t get him out; it was Kohli who got himself out.

Back to Friday night, and the ICC Academy ground. Chakravarthy, bounding in off a longish run-up, first got past the outside edge and knocked out Kohli’s off-stump. A couple of deliveries later, he found the outside edge and the ball flew to where slip would have been. It happens, right? It almost always happens.

But not to worry. New Zealand, India’s opponents in Sunday’s final, don’t possess a leg-spinner. They have four tweakers – skipper Mitchell Santner and Rachin Ravindra, both left-arm spinners who take the ball away from the right-hander, like a leg-spinner does but using fingers rather than the wrist to do so, and off-spinners Michael Bracewell and Glenn Phillips. Those who are still skeptical about Kohli and his travails against leg-spin can rest easy at least on this count.

The former skipper came into the Champions Trophy with niggling concerns over his form. Since making an unbeaten hundred in the second innings of the Perth Test in late November, he had topped 20 just once in his next seven Test knocks in Australia. Against England last month in two ODIs, he scored 5 and 52, the latter a not entirely convincing effort but significant for its timing, if not necessarily his timing, coming as it did in his last competitive dig before the Champions Trophy. He was less than fluent while making 22 in India’s opener against Bangladesh, but the sight of Pakistan, who have been at the receiving end of many a Kohli masterpiece, has clearly rejuvenated him.

A grand chance for Virat Kohli to fortify unshakeable legacy

Now, in potentially his last final in an ICC tournament – with him, you can never say with certainty, can you? – Kohli has a grand chance to further fortify an unshakeable legacy as the greatest limited-overs batter of his, maybe any, generation. Eight months back in Bridgetown, he overturned a poor run at the T20 World Cup with a match-defining 76 in the final, a knock that earned him the Player of the Final honours. It reiterated the showman’s romance with the big stage, with the massive occasion. Nothing gets his juices flowing, his pulse racing, like the grand final of a big tournament and in 50-over cricket, only the World Cup comes bigger than this.

The last time Kohli wore an ICC 50-over winner’s medal around his neck was in Birmingham in 2013 when India defeated England in the final of the Champions Trophy, though the match itself was reduced to 20 overs a side and Kohli was India’s top scorer with 43. An encore a dozen years on will do quite nicely, thank you.

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