Their fate, for the outside eyes at least, seemed pre-scripted. So just as the curly-haired wonder-boy from Mumbai was racking up centuries for fun in school cricket, he was ordained to end up as the highest run-getter by the time he retired from international cricket.
Tendulkar did, in both forms of the game, much before he called time on his illustrious career. One day, he was certain to lead the Indian team. At 23 years, 169 days, he became India’s second youngest Indian captain.
But Tendulkar wouldn’t be the ghost of comparison lurking around him, but that of his immediate predecessor Mahendra Singh Dhoni, statistically India’s most successful cricket leader. It’s the perennial plight of inheritors to be compared with their predecessors, and evaluating Kohli and Dhoni at this juncture is harsh, for the full picture can’t be drawn with isolated brushes from the past.
Yet there are those instances in history when their elemental and, in this case antithetical, philosophies collide head on. For Dhoni, it was Dominica 2011. Tasked to score 180 runs in 47 overs against West Indies on a fifth day, but benign strip against a bowling unit at best perseverant, Dhoni flinched.
With 86 runs required off 90 balls, and seven wickets intact, he abandoned the chase at the onset of the mandatory 15-over period, where teams resigned to the finality of a stalemate shake hands. In this context, it was grossly out of place. At the crease were India’s most trusted pair, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid. To follow them were the brightest young batting talent in the country, the skipper himself and a resourceful Harbhajan Singh. It was impossible to even imagine losing.
But Dhoni chose restraint. An unusual restrain. A restrain than reeked of cynicism. It didn’t alter the outcome of the series, but telegraphed an implicit message to the world—the reigning toppers of Test ranking are nervous and timid, for when an opportunity presented itself to roll over the opponents, they sat back content with a 1-0 win.
Correlating is not always logical. But how Kohli would have approached the chase goes without saying, if the audacity he embodied as stand-in skipper in Adelaide this series was any signifier. Beset with a daunting target of 364 in a little over 90 overs, the sun-dried drop-in wicket wore a ragged look. Salvaging a draw seemed a credible feat in itself. Dousing the collective fire of Mitchell Johnson, Ryan Harris and Nathan Lyon seemed a task fraught with inexorable risk. But Kohli didn’t cringe. He believed they could defy the elements. India forsook caution and strove for glory, the captain himself producing a fine treatise on counterpunching. And until he himself miscued a pull, when on 141, India were in sight of a famous win. Eventually, India fell adrift by 48 runs. But it wasn’t a defeat that left you lamenting or whining. It was a defeat that made you proud that they had gone down fighting. It was a defeat that infused hope, hope in the daring of their would-be leader.
It doesn’t heckle your mind to imagine how Dhoni would have approached the chase. Though such big decisions aren’t just the whim of the skipper—coach, support staff and senior players would all have a say—the skipper’s is still the most authoritative voice in the dressing room. Not that Dhoni’s tactics were outrageously defensive—he was as much a victim of circumstance—but his tactics had a certain restrain. In that sense, he chose to conspire against his own instincts.
While the limited-over dynamics afforded him the perfect setting to “express himself”, to reproduce one of his pet phrases, the demands of Test cricket was different. And he approached it differently. “There was always a clear distinction between the way he approached his captaincy in Tests and limited-over versions. Sometimes in Tests, especially outside the country, he sat back and waited for things to happen. Let things drift away. But in limited-overs cricket, he was always in control of things,” observes former skipper Bishen Singh Bedi.
Whereas in his country Dhoni could cajole the curators to dish out turners—how gloriously it backfired against England in 2012 and how staunchly he defended it—he cut a desolate figure abroad, more so with the gradual rusting of the once-sturdy pillars. And survival, he chose was the best step forward. Thus, the genesis of leg-slip theory.
It might have been like returning to his teens in undivided Bihar, where survival at all costs was the way of life, where cricket, or for that matter any other sport than hockey, was a pastime and not yet a means of livelihood. For the son of an electrician in Mecon, it was always a battle between a small-towner and a big, bad world. So Dhoni had to think alternatively, and this trait spilled over to his captaincy. Whenever the team was in trouble, he chose the nonconformist route out of it.
That Kohli would adopt a similar veil of caution is unlikely. For he was bred in a different milieu. The booming capital was embracing a belligerent uber-culture of its own. Like survival in dusty, chaotic Ranchi, aggression was the lifeblood in throbbing Delhi. He imbibed the win-at-all-costs mentality at a young age.
So Kohli, son of a reasonably well-off lawyer, had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve when he joined Rajkumar Sharma’s cricket academy. “Right from his early days, he was fiercely determined to excel. He practiced hard and really hard with his goals firmly set. Even in a practice game at the academy, he hated to lose. If any bowler had troubled him at the nets, he made it a point that he was ready to hammer him the next time,” Sharma says.
Kohli was not averse to taking responsibilities either. “You just needed to tell him what he needs to do, and he would do that without any complaints,” Sharma adds.
The sense of accountability was an obsession. Even his father’s death in the morning did not prevent Kohli from returning to resume his innings against Karnataka in a Ranji match in 2006. He scored a strokeful 90 and steered his team to safety. Two years later, he won the U-19 World Cup, which spring-boarded him to public consciousness.
Even as Kohli steeply climbed the hierarchy in Indian cricket, he hardly tempered his aggression. He, in turn, channelised it for better returns. For Kohli, each milestone or a catch was a statement of bravado. High-fives and fist-pumping, mostly accompanied by a mouthful of expletives, were all part of a routine Kohli celebration.
Whether he would tone down the bluster remains to be seen. He did it in his first captaincy rehearsal in Kingston. But he was back to his usual self in the Sri Lanka series back home in 2014 and the ongoing Australia tour, where he habitually made front-page headlines for reasons other than his batting. “If that extra bit of aggression helps him perform better, that’s well and good. But he shouldn’t get too soaked up in this, for as the captain of his country, he will have to make a lot of decisions. Now he should be extra careful to not overstep the line of aggression,” former India opener Aakash Chopra serves a warning. To go by his batting, the outward combustibility is a veneer beneath a steely inner self. His three hundreds, each a polished gem, are the latest vindication. In this regard, Kohli is more gifted than Dhoni, whose five-day ineptness outside the subcontinent was a cause of concern throughout India’s barren overseas stretch.
Kohli’s is an all-format-fit technique. Not that he is infallible—he was against the moving ball in England in 2014—but those glitches can be cured with minor adjustments. Dhoni’s technique, conversely, has basic deficiencies, which were ruthlessly exposed in overseas conditions. But importantly, Dhoni knew his limitations and strove to rectify those with his tenacity and defiance. It was to an extent useful in England in the recent series (2014) and in 2007, but on bouncy tracks in South Africa and Australia, he was hardly of any decisive utility.
But at Kohli’s disposal is a team shaped by Dhoni, with all its bonuses and burdens. He has a stable opening partner in Murali Vijay, but his other half, Shikhar Dhawan, has been as brittle as a clay showpiece. Whereas Dhoni had for advice a bunch of worldly-wise senior pros in his early days, Kohli has few to lean on, as only Ishant Sharma is more experienced than him.
The designated No. 3, Cheteshwar Pujara, has looked surprisingly edgy while the precociously talented orchestrator of two ODI double hundreds, Rohit Sharma, is struggling to translate the same to the five-day version. The middle-order hinges on Kohli himself and Ajinkya Rahane. The crop of fast bowlers is promising but needs fine-tuning and someone needs to whip into them a sense of discipline and direction. The lead spinner, R Ashwin, it seems, is mostly confused.
Hence, Kohli is thrust to resume the rebuilding process. How he culminates this, and whether he has the onus, character and composure to supervise it, would determine his success and longevity. “He has an exciting but tough job. He is the best man for it now, but this would be an ultimate test of his character,” observes former opener Chetan Chauhan. As Kohli himself has admitted, it would be a “learning process”. A school from which he will emerge sterner, irrespective of how it treats him.
Careless whispers: Worlds Apart
Whether in the dressing room or in the press room, Dhoni's demeanour hardly betrays his small-town roots. But there have been a few hints, of course. He married a childhood friend—Sakshi Singh—and not a Bollywood star. His humility and down-to-earth attitude have been praised as much as his solid work ethic. Kohli on the other hand gives the impression of the quintessential Gen-Y'er, someone who wouldn't look too out of place in the boardroom of an MNC. He reportedly dated Brazilian model Izabelle Leite previously, and Bollywood actor Anushka Sharma is his current rumoured girlfriend. The relationship has been a staple of Page 3 headlines in recent times and Kohli blew a kiss to the PK actor after his century in the Melbourne Test.
Hot wheels They Love
Dhoni's love for bikes and cars is well known. He owns more than 16 motorbikes, including an Enfield Thunderbird, Harley-Davidson and the Hellcat X132, which costs nearly `60 lakh. The 33-year-old also has his old Yamaha bikes and recently posted a picture of the first bike that he bought—a Rajdoot—on Twitter. He has also developed a special liking for SUVs, his favourites being the Hummer H2 and Land Rover. He also owns a Mitsubishi Pajero and Mahindra Scorpio. Kohli seemingly is a fan of luxury sports cars. His most expensive possession is the Audi R8, a two-door stunner with a top speed of 316 kmph. He also has a BMW X6 (crossover) and a Toyota Fortuner, apparently gifted by the company as he is their brand ambassador.
Different approach
Both Dhoni and Kohli had to take the tough road to the pinnacle of Indian cricket. Born in Ranchi to middle-class parents, Dhoni had worked as a ticket collector in Kharagpur for a while after being ignored by East Zone selectors repeatedly. Kohli too rose to success despite hardship. He lost his father Prem Kohli in 2006 and had to cope with a lot of unwanted attention after leading India to title in the 2008 Under-19 World Cup. It now seems so long ago, but Indian cricket's blue-eyed boy was dropped from the team in 2009.
Aggressive, Pragmatic
The phlegmatic Dhoni may have made a lot of headlines with instinctive decisions in ODIs, but he has been quite conservative in Tests. Many have attributed his poor overseas record to an ultra-defensive approach. Kohli, meanwhile, emerged with his reputation enhanced from the captaincy stint at Adelaide. He hit centuries in both innings and orchestrated a do-or-die sprint to the target. While Dhoni rarely got into disciplinary troubles, Kohli tends to court controversies.
Scenario Change
When Dhoni took over in 2007 for the series Down Under, there were fears that he would alienate the seniors as some of them, including Ganguly, had not been picked. But Dhoni eventually proved that he could handle the seniors with aplomb. He ‘gifted’ Ganguly the captaincy on the final day of the latter’s Test career—in the 4th Test at Nagpur in 2008. Kohli however, faces a different challenge. In the absence of Dhoni, he now has to marshal a group that is slowly finding its feet at the Test level.
Common Passion, Different Teams
Both men are passionate about football. Dhoni, who played as a goalkeeper, is a Manchester United fan and makes it a point to watch them play at Old Trafford every time he tours England. Kohli, on the other hand, is a die-hard fan of Red Devils' arch-rivals Chelsea. Kohli is a co-owner of FC Goa while Dhoni has stakes in Chennaiyin FC.
Hair-Raising, Ink-Loving
Dhoni has always experimented with his hair. Early on, he sported long hair. He was also seen in a Mohawk during the 2013 IPL and opted for an army-style buzz cut ahead of the Australia tour. Kohli, however, has gotten himself inked four times; his favourite is a samurai warrior tattoo.
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