India veteran Virat Kohli announced his Test retirement with immediate effect on Monday, ahead of the national side’s scheduled five-match tour to England in June.
“It’s been 14 years since I first wore the baggy blue in Test cricket. Honestly, I never imagined the journey this format would take me on. It’s tested me, shaped me, and taught me lessons I’ll carry for life,” Kohli wrote on his Instagram handle.
Kohli ended the posted with “#269, signing off”.
The 36-year-old Kohli brings down the curtains on a prolific red-ball career, spanning 14 years and 123 Tests. The batter made his Test debut against the West Indies on June 20, 2011, in Kingston.
Kohli had since gone on to become India’s most successful batter in the previous decade between 2010 and 2019. Kohli was the third-highest Test run-getter in the period, piling on 7202 runs at 54.97 average and 27 centuries, the most by any batter in the time.
However, the India No. 4’s stocks dwindled drastically post-COVID in 2020, aggregating only 2028 runs in 68 innings with three centuries and nine fifties. Incidentally, Kohli’s 30.72 average is the lowest among all 24 Test batters who have aggregated at least 2000 runs since 2020.
Despite his abrupt decision to call time on his red-ball career, Kohli will arguably go down as one of India’s finest batters in the format. With 9230 runs in 210 innings, Kohli stands fourth on the all-time charts among Indian batters, only behind the legendary trio of (15,921), (13,265), and Sunil Gavaskar (10,122) with 9230 runs at a 46.85 average.
Kohli took over the Test captaincy reins from MS Dhoni in 2014 and led India over a successful eight-year tenure. In 68 outings as skipper, Kohli marshalled India to 40 Test match wins, making him the most successful Indian Test captain ever. Only Graeme Smith (53), (48) and Steve Waugh (41) have registered more Test wins among international captains.
Kohli also dominated with the bat while leading the side, aggregating a staggering 5864 runs in 113 innings as captain, the fourth-best tally among all Test tallies. Only South Africa’s Smith (25) recorded more centuries than Kohli (20) as a Test captain.
Despite starting the 2024 Border-Gavaskar Trophy with a century against Australia in Perth, Kohli ended the tour on a horror note with a repeated pattern of caught-behind dismissals hampering his game, amassing only 193 runs. Out of his eight dismissals on the tour, Kohli got out to deliveries outside off stump on seven occasions.
Speaking at a recent event about the mental pressures after the recent Test failures, Kohli had said, “Once you start taking on the energy and the disappointment from the outside, then you start burdening yourself way more… And then you start thinking about things, like ‘I’ve got two or three days left on this tour, I need to make an impact now’. And you start getting more desperate. That’s something I’ve surely experienced in Australia as well.”
Elaborating on that thought, he had said, “Because I got a good score in the first Test. I thought, ‘right, let’s go’. There’s going to be another big series for me. It doesn’t turn out that way. For me, it’s just about the acceptance of ‘okay fine, this is what happened. I’m going to be honest with myself. Where do I want to go? What are my energy levels like’.”
