Familiar problem surfaces with Virat Kohli closest of fading Fab Four to the end

A little over a decade ago, cricket writing became all about the Fab Four. Steve Smith, Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson, Joe Root, each starting to flourish as Test batters, each clearly the future for their respective national teams. We said they would all go on to captain their countries, and they did, as they kept racking up the hundreds, piling up runs, a kind of transnational pact in relentless quality. Always playing against one another, they were nevertheless joined in their own smaller team, urging one another on, opponents to mediocrity.

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These days none is captain any more, with a range of endings to their tenures that span civility to acrimony to scandal. They are all still playing though, elder statesmen in teams that enjoy their presence. Each of them is still the biggest name, the one greeted by most applause when walking to the middle and prompting most excitement from opponents sending them back. None is the team’s best player any longer, but their reputations make it feel as though they are.

In the last fortnight, they have been acting out what may well be their final four-handed piece of cricketing choreography across two national contests. New Zealand hosting England over one side of the Tasman, Australia hosting India on the other. On Sunday, Smith produced a century made of rage against dying light. The next day he was joined on 33 career centuries by Williamson, a player who hasn’t had the same trouble with slumping scores or technique, but has battled physical decline with an increasing array of injuries.

Joe Root, who a couple of years ago was drifting behind the others and in danger of having his membership revoked, has made six tons this year and streaked to the lead with 36. His most recent came 10 days ago in Wellington, and at the moment of writing he has plenty of time to add another in the fourth innings at Hamilton with New Zealand more than 600 in the lead.

Then there is Kohli. The biggest name, the biggest star. The oldest, by a few months to Smith, a couple of years to the others. He had the densest years of run-scoring, if you fold in a one-day international record that dwarfs the others. His recent years have tailed off most severely. He made his 30th Test century in the third innings of this current series in Perth, setting up a huge lead and an ultimately easy Indian win. And despite that, two weeks later in Brisbane, Kohli of all the four looks closest to an end.

Never disregard a Test hundred, because none are easy: even in the kindest conditions, most players in a team don’t get there. But you can acknowledge the truth of generous circumstances, and Kohli’s Perth hundred came after young opener Yashasvi Jaiswal had batted, and battered, Australia’s bowlers into exhaustion. Against a ball not misbehaving, Kohli was able to build an innings of substance the way he once did routinely. He celebrated it with relief.

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Walking out at the Gabba, though, after plentiful rain and Australia’s 445 had pushed India’s first innings into the third day, Kohli versus Josh Hazlewood was a contest that felt like it left the batter highly vulnerable. Sharp bounce from the pitch, height from the bowler, in the only Australian city where Kohli has played without making a hundred, albeit from only one previous match. That time, in 2014, Kohli was also undone cheaply by bounce, including by Hazlewood on debut. And by this stage in his career, Kohli’s problems outside off stump have become legend.

So it was again: the wander across the crease, the ball’s line an imaginary third set of stumps wider than the wooden ones in the ground, and yet Kohli feeling for it with his score on three. A drive without conviction, little foot movement, an inevitable nick from a bat angled outwards, held so far from the body that it might have been a noxious nappy bag.

While Kohli might reflect that the shot was comparable to that bag’s contents, assessing it individually is meaningless given how regularly he is now dismissed this way. The error doesn’t reflect a player unsure whether to play or leave, beaten by a bowler’s consistency around off stump. It reflects a player going out of his way to get out. That dismissal was part of India falling to 51-4 on a heavily rain-affected day, with more rain all that will save them in the match. How a player who was one of the most successful, one of the most ruthless, one of the most thorough, can keep being drawn to the same downfall, is the mystery.

Three of the Fab Four are fading, while the youngest in Root enjoys the kind of late bloom that can soon turn the same way. But Smith and Williamson are scrapping against fate on their way to the end, straining to get the most out of bodies and reflexes, trying everything possible. Compared to this, Kohli’s Groundhog Day suggests a mind that is tired of finding solutions, one that can’t help but succumb to reflex. If something significant doesn’t change, surely it means that his drive to keep succeeding has also faded – or that somebody else has to point out to him that it has. According to the movies, even infinite time loops eventually find an end.