Former India and Royal Challengers Bangalore skipper Virat Kohli is having difficulties in finding his true form in recent times and hasn’t been able to provide the goods for his team for some time now.
The 33-year-old’s string of failures with the bat was pretty evident in his last game for his IPL franchise Royal Challengers Bangalore as he was sent back to the pavilion with a first-ball duck on Tuesday in the IPL 2022 match against Lucknow Super Giants at the D.Y Patil Stadium.
The disappointing dismissal for another one of his innings meant that the former Indian skipper had set a dubious record of going 100 competitive games without a century. Virat Kohli has now gone 17 Tests, 21 ODIs, 25 T20Is, and 37 IPL matches without scoring a ton, according to a tweet put out by cricket statistician Mahzer Arshad.
On Tuesday, Kohli came in to bat after RCB had lost the opener, Anuj Rawat, quiet early for just 4 runs in the first over. Kohli went for a first-ball duck in the last delivery of the first over. It was a back-of-length ball outside off and the 33-year-old Delhi batter just pushed it for a simple catch to the fielder at point.
In the seven matches that have been played in the IPL 2022 so far, Kohli has only managed to score 119 runs at an average of 19.83 with the highest score of 48.
Kolhi is the top-scorer in IPL history so far with 6402 in 214 matches with five centuries and 42 fifties. He is also seventh on the list of batters with more runs (combined, Test, ODI, T20I) in cricket history with 23,650 runs. Sachin Tendulkar leads the list with 34,357 combined runs across all formats.
It is because of the batsman’s former role as a captain and because of unlimited potential that he is being criticised about not being able to score a three number score in a single game. He relinquished the Test captaincy recently and has been replaced by former vice-captain Rohit Sharma as captain across all formats. Virat’s lean form is a cause of concern for India, especially in a T20 World Cup year. The ‘Men in Blue’ can’t afford to have a struggling Kohli in Australia later this year.
His latest failure on Tuesday received a lot of attention on social media with many netizens arguing in favour and some against him, talking of the difficulty of scoring centuries in T20 cricket, including IPL. Kohli incidentally is second on the list of players with most centuries in IPL with five tons, trailing Chris Gayle (6).
(Inputs from IANS)