A ground that has seen some of Virat Kohli’s absolute best at the crease, the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on March 13 also saw the great batter’s Test average slip below 50 for the first time since 2017. The marginal dip came to light after Kohli suffered his second successive cheap dismissal in the D/N Test against Sri Lanka at the venue.
Kohli entered the match – also his 101st in Test whites for India – with an average of 50.35 after 100 Tests, having scored a whopping 8,007 runs with 27 centuries and 28 half-centuries. But twin scores of 23 & 13 in the second Test of the series meant that the average slipped by a thin margin to 49.95.
Kohli got out to identical dismissals in the Test match, done in by the low bounce on a tricky surface on both occasions. In the first half, he was out LBW to part-time spinner Dhananjaya de Silva, while in the second it was left-arm spinner Praveen Jayawickrama who pinned him in front of the stumps.
Kohli was perhaps really unfortunate in the first instance as that was the only ball that kept so low on Day 1 of the Test match. But on the second one, he was equally guilty of playing across the line of the delivery.
This is the first time in his mighty successful career that the 33-year-old is showing such repeated errors at the crease. The twin failures in Bangalore and the dip below an average of 50 are part of a longstanding downward curve in his returns since the start of 2020. The great batter averages a measly 28.03 across 17 Test matches in this phase. He last made a Test century – or any international hundred – back in November 2019.
In what is a bowling era – with unprecedentedly lengthy bowling attacks and tough pitches – Kohli did begin well by dominating during the 2018-19 overseas cycle but the deeper he has gone into this era, the worse his numbers have gotten. India desperately need him back to scoring a truckload of runs once again.
