Cricketer-turned-commentator Aakash Chopra has said that you would have rarely identified former Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) skipper Virat Kohli as someone, who would “hit five sixes in ten balls”, but the 2016 season saw him redefine T20 batting and turned him into a rockstar.
“If you looked at Virat Kohli the batter before that, you knew he could get you runs but nobody looked at him as a quintessential rockstar T20 batter. He was more of a collector, grafter, maybe he would hit boundaries, but very rarely would you see him take the aerial route and hit five sixes in ten balls. He was not that kind of a player,” Chopra, a former Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) player, told JioCinema.
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“Virat Kohli redefined the batting in T20 cricket in that particular season. He proved that you can play T20 cricket with proper technique, even with that, not one or two, but he scored four centuries. That season was just phenomenal, he was a man possessed,” he added.
The 2016 edition of the Indian Premier League was indeed special for Kohli both as a batsman and as a captain. He plundered close to an incredible 1,000 runs (973 runs to be exact) in 16 matches in that edition at a phenomenal strike rate of 152.03 and an average of 81.08. His exploits included seven fifties and four hundreds. Even Sunrisers Hyderabad captain David Warner’s herculean effort that saw him amass 848 runs in 17 matches could not get him past Kohli. That year was Kohli’s year.
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As a captain, Kohli overturned years of indifferent results and helped his side notch up one victory after another. RCB finished second on the table after their group engagements with eight wins out of their 14 matches. This ensured RCB’s passage to the playoffs, where they edged out table-toppers Gujarat Lions in the first qualifier. However, captain Kohli ended up being the tragic hero, and despite his quickfire 54 in the final against SRH, he finished second-best.
However, the key takeaway from that season, as Chopra rightly said, was Kohli showing to one and all that T20 cricket is not all about playing cross-batted swipes and slogs and you can actually go at the rate of knots by playing proper cricketing strokes and taking the minimum of risks.
Kohli, who stepped down as captain of the Bangalore franchise after the 14th edition of the IPL in 2021, currently holds the record for most runs in the IPL. He is the owner of 6,624 IPL runs, including five centuries and 44 half-centuries. Under his captaincy, RCB have won 64 out of their 140 matches, giving him a win percentage of 48.16%. He has been with RCB since the inaugural year of the tournament in 2008 and is the only player to have appeared in over 220 matches for a single franchise.
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