The last time Virat Kohli scored an international century, the world was a different place. Covid- 19 was a distant thunder, but we, frankly, hardly knew as much. We read about Wuhan, and moved on to the cinema page, which was mostly about Bollywood. You know what it means. Donald Trump was still mucking about in the White House, and few would have given Joe Biden a chance at the time. Johnny Depp might only have been limbering up, so to speak, to take Amber Heard on, having long taken her in his stride. So many problems have been got rid of, and the pandemic is ebbing. The sum of what Kohli managed to do in the interregnum, however, wasn’t quite awesome, not even in the Indian Premier League. So what Rahul Dravid, days ahead of the held-over Edgbaston Test, said was quite realistic.

India’s coach let it be known he wasn’t pressuring Kohli into the space where life would be a century or a full circle with a big void within it. A matchwinning innings was all he was counting on Kohli for, and that could fall well short of the three-digit mark. To say that India’s former all-format captain couldn’t pull it off subsequently in the fifth Test would be akin to declaring peace had recently been somewhat elusive in Ukraine. Kohli, honestly speaking, scarcely looked the part, though his being on a short fuse continued to be a big story. When the battle was lost and won, he got laughed at for having flipped his lid, and there were reports abroad he had acknowledged having been wrong, but our kind of patriotism might have pre-empted similar disclosures in our part of the world. And there is reason enough to think, especially after Edgbaston, the Kohli cause could, to crucial people, be bigger than the Indian one.

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It’s as if small scores are peripheral, instead of being central. Kohli would’ve found the going tough in Australia or England though, given the length of what was very charitably being called his form slump. The roasting would have been couched in Queen’s English in Blighty and taken on a more abrasive quality Down Under, but it couldn’t be wished away. In India, a mere possibility ~ or a perception of it ~ of his losing his Twenty20 Internationals berth when the World Cup comes around later this year results in effete media whispers that suggest a subterranean disinclination to rub stalwarts up the wrong way. And, stay on the right side of auxiliary power wielders who pull many commercial strings and know their Dale Carnegie from soup to nuts. That’s why India, away from the sub-continent, could find the going tough again. It’s a bad, bad, bad world and those who make it sadder than it should be for honest, hard-working and promising youngsters soaring on wings of hope deserve the harshest of publicly proclaimed indictments. Let’s put a stop to free lunches in Indian cricket.