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What do you think of Virat Kohli?
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flibbertyjibber
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On a serious note can't wait to see what he does on his next tour of England. Had a nightmare last time but the great players manage to adapt, hope he can too.
OverratedSanity
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Yeah, really looking forward to it. I'm a bit worried though, because there hasn't been any obvious sign in the two years since the 2014 tour that he's managed to iron that out. The way he nicked off to Mathews in Sri Lanka a couple of times was especially worrisome.
Furball
Evil Scotsman
This just in: bear shits in woods.
G.I.Joe
International Coach
That's disgusting, Jono. It should be. That's why we have doors on toilets.
Daemon
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Yeah, agreed.
I also don't think it's a stretch to say that Lara was one of the best 100 batsmen of all time.
Victor Ian
International Coach
I'm to lazy to look it up, but has Kohli scored the most runs in an IPL tournament by a long way?
OverratedSanity
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Yep. Previous best was Gayle and Kohli's already bettered the record by over 100 runs. Insane.
He'd never really done that great in the IPL before this season tbh.
G.I.Joe
International Coach
honestbharani
Whatever it takes!!!
:
OverratedSanity
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This next season is the one for Kohli I think. I'm backing him to take his test game to that next level and if he still has only a good but not godlike season, I'm going to be massively disappointed. He'll be 28 in a few months and he has to hit his prime quickly.
Zinzan
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Interesting way to assess Kohli as a T20 bat, if not slightly oversimplified, but not totally untrue either, especially when comparing with AB's numbers. Thoughts?
Blogs: Kartikeya Date: Two myths about the IPL | Cricket Blogs | ESPN Cricinfo
The 2016 IPL was a record-breaking tournament for India's Test captain. Two tropes about the season have become apparent. First, that Virat Kohli is a great T20 player. Second, that the best bowling attack in the tournament defeated the best batting line-up. Both claims are arguably false.
Let's consider the first. Kohli was not even the best player in the Royal Challengers Bangalore side, let alone in the IPL. He seemed to attempt to make the transition from batting to hitting during the course of the tournament, but he never quite shed his classical training as a batsman. In the final, for example, he made 54 off 35 balls. He used up more than 25% of the deliveries available to his team and scored at less than the overall asking rate. He made only 15 off his first 18 balls. A true-blue T20 hitter would not have waited 18 balls to tee off when faced with an asking rate of ten runs per over. The problem with waiting that long is that one has to then pull off slogs for much longer in order to break even.
When the asking rate is ten runs per over over 20 overs, there simply aren't many options. This is not a problem of the imagination, it is a compulsion of arithmetic. The great difference between Kohli and AB de Villiers (the best player in the 2016 RCB side) is that de Villiers can tee off from the start if need be. De Villiers found the boundary once every 4.3 balls. Kohli was a whole delivery slower, at 5.3 balls per boundary. Each hit almost the same number of sixes through the competition (37 for de Villiers, 38 for Kohli), and Kohli faced 233 extra deliveries.
By all conventional measures of batting, Kohli on current form must be considered ahead of de Villiers. He made more runs at a better average and was dismissed less often. But in a T20 game circa now, 11 de Villierses would beat 11 Kohlis, on average by 20 runs.
It is clear that Kohli is an exceptional batsman, but batting - the art of building innings and navigating different types of bowling on different types of pitches reliably and scoring big runs - is a distraction in T20. In 16 matches, Kohli brought RCB 973 runs for 12 dismissals at 152 runs per 100 balls. Would RCB not have been better off getting those 973 runs spread over two or three batsmen at a strike rate of closer to 180-190? They had the wickets to spare.
It is a basic rule in cricket that attempting to score quickly results in more wickets falling. The charts below demonstrate this. The first is a plot of the scoring rate in an over in all T20 matches against the number of wickets lost in that over. As the scoring rate increases, so does the number of wickets.
Blogs: Kartikeya Date: Two myths about the IPL | Cricket Blogs | ESPN Cricinfo
The 2016 IPL was a record-breaking tournament for India's Test captain. Two tropes about the season have become apparent. First, that Virat Kohli is a great T20 player. Second, that the best bowling attack in the tournament defeated the best batting line-up. Both claims are arguably false.
Let's consider the first. Kohli was not even the best player in the Royal Challengers Bangalore side, let alone in the IPL. He seemed to attempt to make the transition from batting to hitting during the course of the tournament, but he never quite shed his classical training as a batsman. In the final, for example, he made 54 off 35 balls. He used up more than 25% of the deliveries available to his team and scored at less than the overall asking rate. He made only 15 off his first 18 balls. A true-blue T20 hitter would not have waited 18 balls to tee off when faced with an asking rate of ten runs per over. The problem with waiting that long is that one has to then pull off slogs for much longer in order to break even.
When the asking rate is ten runs per over over 20 overs, there simply aren't many options. This is not a problem of the imagination, it is a compulsion of arithmetic. The great difference between Kohli and AB de Villiers (the best player in the 2016 RCB side) is that de Villiers can tee off from the start if need be. De Villiers found the boundary once every 4.3 balls. Kohli was a whole delivery slower, at 5.3 balls per boundary. Each hit almost the same number of sixes through the competition (37 for de Villiers, 38 for Kohli), and Kohli faced 233 extra deliveries.
By all conventional measures of batting, Kohli on current form must be considered ahead of de Villiers. He made more runs at a better average and was dismissed less often. But in a T20 game circa now, 11 de Villierses would beat 11 Kohlis, on average by 20 runs.
It is clear that Kohli is an exceptional batsman, but batting - the art of building innings and navigating different types of bowling on different types of pitches reliably and scoring big runs - is a distraction in T20. In 16 matches, Kohli brought RCB 973 runs for 12 dismissals at 152 runs per 100 balls. Would RCB not have been better off getting those 973 runs spread over two or three batsmen at a strike rate of closer to 180-190? They had the wickets to spare.
It is a basic rule in cricket that attempting to score quickly results in more wickets falling. The charts below demonstrate this. The first is a plot of the scoring rate in an over in all T20 matches against the number of wickets lost in that over. As the scoring rate increases, so does the number of wickets.
