AHMEDABAD: On the fourth day of the fourth Test against Australia on Sunday, India’s star cricketer Virat Kohli scored his first century since November 2019.
With a single off Nathan Lyon, “King Kohli” scored his 28th Test hundred after 241 balls, setting up frenzied celebrations in Ahmedabad at the largest cricket stadium in the world.
He recognised the audience and the dressing room while appearing to cry, kissed the locket on his gold chain, smiled, and raised his gaze to the sky.
A 600-kilogram gorilla is off his back, yelled commentator Ravi Shastri. By this evening, he will be a couple of inches taller.
A banner in the throng said “Come to witness King Kohli ruling in his realm” while children in India shirts bowed in homage.
After reaching his first Test half-century since January 2022 on day three on a pitch that favoured the batsmen, the great batsman resumed play on his overnight total of 59.
Kohli, 34, experienced a protracted dry spell in 2017, failing to hit three digits for more than a thousand days.
Late in 2021, he resigned as Twenty20 captain. In January 2022, he lost his one-day captaincy as well. He also gave up captaining the Test team.
Yet at the Asia Cup T20 event in September of last year, he hit his first tonne after 1,020 days, and he hasn’t looked back since.
Kohli scored the most runs during the T20 World Cup in Australia and went on to make three ODI hundreds, including two in January’s match against Sri Lanka (113 and 166 not out).
Since his debut in 2011, the former captain has played in 108 Test matches, averaging over 48, and he has scored 75 hundreds across the three international forms.
“The Fantastic Four of Modern Batting: Root, Smith, Kohli, and Williamson”
The “fantastic four,” the top four batters of the contemporary era, including England’s Joe Root and Australia’s interim skipper Steve Smith in order of the number of Test hundreds each has scored. Virat Kohli is still behind both of them.
After Kohli’s slump, Smith passed him, and since his previous 95th Test, Smith has scored 30 test centuries. 29 are in Root.
Kane Williamson, a batsman for New Zealand, has 26 test tonnes.
In the first Test played in India during the day and night, Kohli scored his previous Test century against Bangladesh.