Virat Kohli, the master sculptor who shaped India’s Champions Trophy triumph — and earned redemption

Donning a titular role in winning an ICC trophy has been like a revolver pointed at his head. He has conquered everything a cricketer could possibly do — love and adulation, respect and riches, countless trophies and individual milestones. In fact, he has won too much; everything cricketing-kind could offer him, the WTC mace aside. But an immensely proud cricketer, he doesn’t want to be seen wilting under pressure in big matches, as someone bereft of the mysterious inner quality that separates winners from losers, in a format he loves the most.

Even if he were to lose, it would not tarnish his greatness. It’s a stretch to read one failure as an emblem of his entire international career. It would not be seen as his destiny or duty. He has won cricket’s equivalent of a Nobel and Oscar. So what would missing out on a Goldsmiths Prize or Filmfare mean to him? But sport is full of paradoxes. Sometimes its most irrelevant moments are also its most eloquent.

Long, he had suffered the Sachin Tendulkar syndrome. In their time, both reigned as the undisputed monarchs in this format. The hundreds, the runs, reward cheques and statistical nuggets piled, a halo blazed, records tumbled, yet their careers felt incomplete, missing that one step that could make them the game’s immortal.

A pang lurked inside them for all the individual glory, that they couldn’t influence knockouts as much as they would have desired, as much as their outsized talents would have deserved. Something went awry in clutch games. Before the final, his scores in knockout read thus: 24, 9, 35, 58 not out, 43, 3, 1, 5, 1, 117, 54. Not utterly trivial numbers for most cricketers, but irrefutably for Kohli.

His impact and numbers, non-knockouts aside, have been incredible.

Only Tendulkar is ahead of him, by a meagre margin of 178 runs. But the knockout anomaly could have haunted him. In 2024, he finally kissed the T20 crown after stacking a load of runs in every edition. In 2025, he was thirsting for the Champions Trophy. Unlike Tendulkar who waited for a lifetime, 22 years, to finally touch the World Cup, Kohli achieved it in his second year. Two years later, he caressed the Champions Trophy.

But this was before Kohli became Kohli, before he began conquering batting peaks. There was Tendulkar and Dhoni. There is Rohit now too. But Kohli would always be the figurehead. He is stoked by such vaulting ambition that he would have wanted to win one of his own. The wait seemed interminable, and often, cursed. He tasted the sting of defeats in five finals across formats. Thrice, he left fuming after exits in the semifinal stage. The reunion with trophies seemed an impossible dream when he plummeted to depths of depression during the pandemic years.

Maybe, it was the vision of winning trophies that fuelled him to compose a stirring comeback. There have been times when the weight of a nation’s febrile hopes and dreams appeared too great a burden for him. It made him anxious and sick with nerves. It made the fear of failure unbearable and the pain of defeat even worse. This time, perhaps, he wanted to win it for himself, unhindered by the crushing weight of the nation’s expectations.

He has reached that elevated stage of his career when the records, judgement and perceptions have stopped disturbing him. But Kohli loathes to lose. It’s the spirit that has blazed in the toughest times of his life, from breaking to the domestic side with the whimsy selection discretion to attending a Ranji match soon after setting his father’s funeral, from shedding junk to chisel out a flab-free physique and dousing the demons of England and the dervishes that inhabited his head in the pandemic years.

It could be a magic elixir that could give wings to his career. Perhaps it would resurrect his Test career, definitely give him another shot at the 2027 ODI World Cup, and add more streaks of light to his halo and more pages to the Kohli Myth.

Refusing to lose

It is a tournament he refused to lose. Throughout the series, he seemed to run on something extra — extra desire, resolve, and motivation.

He always wears emotions on his sleeves, the eyes are vivid, the facial muscles as relaxed and flexible as a character actor and the body language evocative. But even by his instinct for the dramatic, he has not shed so many variegated emotions in a single tournament. Against Australia, he thick-edged an aerial cover-drive, inside out, to third man. He slapped his right pad in anguish, hurled a cuss word at the skies, and shook his head. In the game against Pakistan, he stood on sunken knees and bent head after failing to clear the fine-leg fielder on the sweep. He rolled his eyes, because he could have nudged the ball a little squarer so that he could have fetched a four rather than a single.

There was the same bloody-mindedness and a fully embodied determination that he was not going to accept anything less from his time in the middle than a three-figure mark, that had symbolised his peak years.

He was brutal on himself when he edged or missed something outside the off-stump, the tragic flaw of his marvellous career that resurfaces and spooks him intermittently. The vulnerability is less pronounced in white-ball formats, but Kohli was livid with himself whenever an indiscretion or intemperance passed by.

It could be distinct formats, climes and bowlers, but the difference in his movements at the crease was discernible. The forward stride was definite, the transfer of weight smooth, the feet glided rather than moved, the judgement outside the off-stump precise and those travelled legs rediscovered its spark and zest.

He is no longer the captain; but on the field, he remains the leader. His energy remains unbridled, his involvement unfettered. He was at the core of every tactic. He was in the bowlers’ ears, or the fielders’ eye-line when they erred. A growl, a stare, he spoke a thousand words with his expressions alone.

It was, fundamentally, the conquest of his will. Physically, he is still an exemplary athletic specimen, capable of long hauls under the crushing sun, and his energy inexhaustible, neutralising the inevitable waning of reflexes as he ages.

But something in his mind seemed to have snapped that it restricted his freedom, distorted his judgement and pierced his impregnable strength of mind. Perhaps, the outside chatter of his waning form disturbed him, perhaps he could not reconcile with a less prolific phase of his career. Perhaps, the recurring susceptibility outside the off-stump was haranguing him; or that now he is a walking red-ball wicket, so much so a journeyman seamer could uproot his stumps in his Ranji comeback. Whatever the mental ghosts that spooked him, he has slain them in the tournament.

Each innings was the optimal response to the circumstances, the match situation and the attack. A master in his zen, with a supernatural awareness of angles and space, the mind processing the variables like a supercomputer. Perhaps, the tournament would resuscitate his red-ball career. But this much is certain: No one ever would bat like this again in this format, or even have the chance to be great like this, as the 50-over dissolves into irrelevance and inconsequential bilateral series. He is one of those extreme talents in every sport, those who seem to be operating within a bespoke little pocket of time and space. It’s only a curious fate he had to wait this long to define an ICC 50-over tournament.