The long and agonising wait is finally over for Virat Kohli. He had to wait until he had reached almost the sunset of his glittering, glorious career. He had to wait until he had tasted the sting of defeat in two World Cup finals, one apiece in the two white-ball formats, two World Test Championship finals, to finally get the feeling he had craved since that beatific night in Wankhede, 13 summers ago. Finally, he was there, soaking in the golden hour.
Everything conspired to fulfil his dream. Marco Jansen gifted him three boundary balls in the first over that he obliged with a gracious smile. The double-blow next over offered the perfect situation for him. He could play the game his mind and muscle had memorised. He could afford to block; escape the clutches of stepping up the scoring rate; he could take his time. The situation warranted him to dial the vintage Kohli, the careful aggressor rather than the forced tempo-setter. A flurry of boundaries later, he settled into the tip-and-run mode that’s a feature of his best knocks. For 38 balls, the idea of a four did not exist. Then, in the 18th over, he unshackled with a lightning six. The feet twinkled, the wrists danced, and in the next nine balls before he got out, Kohli smeared 26 runs.
The difference between his previous outings this campaign and Sunday’s was the balance of his body and head, the alignment of structure, the bat now an extension of his body. Till the final, he had lost his shape in pursuit of semi-agricultural heaves and hacks, un-Kohli like. But the situation played out perfectly to make his dream come true.
This was in many ways Kohli’s World Cup, yet it seemed it would not be his.
It is a cruel paradox that his most memorable World Cup would also be his least prolific. He was India’s heartbeat in the 2016 edition, chiselling matches with his batsmanship, shaping games with his willow, the player of the tournament for the second time on the spin. In the 2022 edition, he carved his finest T20 knock ever.
This installment, he forsook individual glory for the team’s sake, perished repeatedly in pursuit of quick runs. He swallowed his ego and pride, so that his team could benefit. In the depths of his heart, hurt would simmer that he had not been amongst the runs, but any day, every day, he would swap runs for the trophy, sacrificing individual accolades for the team’s success.
He would remember this night as the one he finally shrugged the shadows of tragedy that had swallowed him in World Cups, since that epochal night in Mumbai in 2011, the first time he hoisted the World Cup trophy, moments after he had carried on his shoulders his idol, Sachin Tendulkar, and uttered the immortal lines: “Sachin Tendulkar has carried the burden of the nation for 21 years. It is time we carried him on our shoulders.”
Victory belongs to the tenacious
For the next 13 years, Kohli expended every drop of sweat and skill, to reproduce what Tendulkar produced for his generation, to be the team’s identity, the soul and figurehead. With his swaggering captaincy, he moulded teams in his image, instilled the virtues of ruthlessness and doggedness; bhangra chartbusters blared from the dressing room; aggression and indefatigability blazed on the ground. With the bat, he conquered every corner of the cricketing globe. With his work ethic and commitment to fitness, he inspired a generation of aspiring cricketers. Under him, India scaled unscaled peaks, won a Test series in Australia for the first time; transformed into a genuine Test force abroad, and shed the perceived softness of teams from the subcontinent.
Yet, he had to wait, and wait, and wait to feel what it was like to lift a World Cup again. He came tantalisingly close. Finalists in 2014, semifinalist in 2016 and 2022; finalists in the ODI World Cup 2023; semifinalists in 2015 and 2019, losing finalists in the World Test Championship in 2021 and 2023. The naysayers would scavenge on his tragic flaws, fickle fans would begin to distrust him, captaincy would be shorn off him. Failures wrecked his mind and body; runs dried up. “It’s not a great feeling to wake up knowing that you won’t be able to score runs… I felt I was the loneliest guy in the world,” he said on a podcast with English commentator Mark Nicholas.
The dream seemed eternally elusive too. He rekindled during the 50-over World Cup last year. “My career highlight is obviously winning the World Cup in 2011. I was 23 at the time, and I probably didn’t understand the magnitude of it. But now at 34, and having played many World Cups, which we haven’t been able to win, I understand the emotions better,” he said before the 2023 World Cup.
It has become a familiar arc that this World Cup —his last in this format at least — was his final opportunity to make up for the disappointments of the past, to cement his legacy, to match the achievements of his historical peers, Tendulkar, MS Dhoni and Kapil Dev.
The thread is irresistible, but flawed. For, his legacy as a batting great is already secure, his numerical achievements veers on the ridiculous. Beyond all these, he is not here because he needs a World Cup to be remembered as a great. He is here because it is the one thing that would mean more to him, as well as his fans and country, than any other. He sees it as somewhere between his duty and destiny, somewhere between satisfying the self and the country.
And now, at last, he has done what he had set out to do. Kohli realising his destiny, his career acquiring a completeness. For years, he had hoped. For weeks, he had believed. Only at this moment, though, with victory achieved, did Kohli know that his destiny had been fulfilled. He had waited long enough. But he needn’t wait any longer.
