When Virat Kohli fails with the bat, India’s media, or self-important constituent units of it, phrases its sentences in a way suggestive of a rather egregious lapse in the Great Scheme of Things, like a pregnant man in a maternity ward. Or a bird spotted swimming across the Ganga. When the former (all-format) India captain makes a splash, it is time for the good, old thesaurus to be looked upon the Net for a few gems to be culled to make the copy twinkle. 

But Kohli, for quite some time now, has not distinguished himself with a knock which might have shown him up as someone who was fit enough to bat before the Queen in her parlour. He has not hit a century for more than two years. And in the Indian Premier League being held currently, Kohli has been a consensual wash-out, with a French news agency graphically describing his post-dismissal reactions to tap into a national disaster – or disappointment – and cricketing voices, oracular or not, hinting at self-inflicted pressures to get going or keep rolling. The diagnosis, of course, followed his golden ducks in successive IPL games. Things were that bad. It probably mattered a lot because not taking the IPL by storm is generally looked upon as an offence worse than failing to get into two digits against Afghanistan or Zimbabwe. So, it is quite understandable that Kohli’s failures in Indian domestic cricket’s midsummer madness convey the impression of having been reported with profound regrets, equalling or exceeding the shock produced by natural accidents. 

There is speculation, whether or not based on facts, that the controversial cricketer is going to be rested from some tours in the immediate future, marked by a peevishly complaining note that is faintly suggestive of the outrage that would rock the world if SP Balasubramaniam or Sonu Nigam were asked to sing his 10th song of the day by a cruelly insensitive film producer. We must be grateful for small mercies if the fact of fixture congestion comes home to usually junket-happy journos this way, but what gets submerged under tidal waves of sympathy for the overstressed superstar is the easily verifiable information that Kohli has indeed been allowed spells of respite in the recent past without any discernible improvement in his performance. Stars, it has been said, are people who compel attention even when doing nothing. Superstars are even greater than humans. Kohli, for example, had essentially called into question cricket board chief Sourav Ganguly’s credibility when limited-overs captaincy was a white-hot debate. The board then got Chetan Sharma to side with Ganguly and buttress the official version, which would have strengthened Maharaj’s position. Kohli got away with it, though, and that as they say, was that. IPL failures are small beer in comparison.