Saturday 19 / April / 2025
In a year when Ravichandran Ashwin was voted the ICC Cricketer of the Year and when three of the 10 youngsters blooded by India left the selectors spoilt for choice, the undisputed hero for Indian fans was Virat Kohli — the man who didn’t find a place in the ICC Test team for 2016.
The year 2016 had a fair share of moments that put smiles back on the face of Indian fans. It’s naive to claim that it was Kohli who had switched all the sunshine on and lit the rainbows, but what we didn’t miss in each of the frames was the spirit of Kohli shining through as bright as it should get and quite infectious. It was so visible and compelling that Piers Morgan had to finally tweet, getting embarrassed this time for the right reason, something positive about Indian sport, seeing the joke of Alastair Cook being slotted in in the ICC Test team as its captain and Kohli not finding a place even as the 12th man.
The 10 Indians who were capped in 2016 were KL Rahul, Jasprit Bumrah, Gurkeerat Singh Mann, Barinder Sran, Rishi Dhawan, Faiz Fazal, Hardik Pandya, Yuzvendra Chahal, Jayant Yadav and Karun Nair.
Of these, five demanded our attention, and they were Rahul, Bumrah, Hardik, Jayant and Karun. All of them are quite good at all the three formats of the game, and three of them — Rahul, Yadav and Karun — grabbed their opportunity in the longer version in a way that left the selectors in an embarrassing position in view of seniors like Shikhar Dhawan, Ajinkya Rahane and Rohit Sharma getting ready to line up in the queue.
While Jayant’s maiden Test ton in only the third international match of his life was impressive at the lower end of the batting order, Rahul and Karun proved critics of the shorter formats, especially T20, wrong, converting their hundreds into bigger scores — into just a run short of a double ton, in case of Rahul, and into the third in history of debutant centurions making a triple ton, in case Karun.
Who could now say the shorter formats are making youngsters incapable of building an innings?
The year 2016 also saw India making to the top of the ICC Test rankings, dethroning Pakistan after a 178-run win over New Zealand in the second Test of the series at the Eden Gardens on October 3. Kohli and his boys ensured that the team would ring in the New Year as the No.1 Test team with a 4-0 series victory over England, leaving no chance for Pakistan or Australia to sneak back to the top.
Kohli was not picked for the 2016 ICC Test team because he had played only eight Tests during the September 14, 2015, to September 20, 2016, voting period, during which he knocked up 451 runs at an average of 45.10. The Indian skipper had been in full bloom from September 21, 2016, posting 964 runs in eight Tests at an 80-plus average. In all, Kohli played 12 Tests in 2016, scoring 1,215 runs.
No apparent divisions in the team for now, and that’s one of the blessings Kohli will enjoy for some time, or at least till the time his form and his fitness would remain just as great as it’s now.
However, there will come a time when his limbs lose some of the power and reflexes when fielding and when he might not be able to hit the ball where he would want to or as hard as he would like to. He doesn’t have to deal with high-profile seniors as MS Dhoni, who had superstars such as Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Saurav Ganguly as teammates, did, and there’s no understudy looking impatiently to step into his shoes, either.
All’s well for the time being. Going is expected to be good for the entire 2017 and until mid-2018 when the Indians would embark on a tour of England. The Test team will be at home for the most of 2017 and it’s only towards the end, in November, that they will be setting foot on one of the four forbidden territories, this time South Africa.
Expected to tour England in June 2018, Australia in November 2018 and New Zealand in February 2019, India could look forward to another fantastic year of Test cricket in the entire 2017 and until towards the middle of the next year, which is an opportunity and a limitation.
An opportunity, no matter how hard Steve Smith would try to get Kohli a bit angry, and a limitation because the Indian skipper need to wait longer than he would like to to get up, close and technical with a few guys, James Anderson included, and their guesses.
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The writer is a freelance contributor based in India. All the views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of Times of Oman
