Virat Kohli has been out of form for five years now – he’s basically John Crawley without the hundreds

3 minute read

We put it to you that India currently have access to batters who are better than 1990s England Test cricketer, John Crawley. That is a little uncomfortable given who such a player could replace. (Spoiler: it’s Virat Kohli.)

If you haven’t seen Virat Kohli’s latest dismissal against New Zealand, let us tell you that it was very horrible.

Mitchell Santner bowled a full toss, Kohli’s eyes lit up to the extent they presumably blinded themselves, and he swung hard across the line, like this:

Kohli missed the ball completely and was bowled.

Santner celebrated like he’d won on a scratch card and the prize was ‘another scratch card’.

We haven’t scrutinised every single Virat Kohli Test dismissal, but this must be a contender for his lamest. It is also the latest instalment in a surprisingly long-running story entitled “Virat Kohli is a sort of okay Test batter”.

Sort of okay?

Yeah, not dreadful, but most nations would hope they could find someone a bit more productive. Kohli’s career batting average remains stratospherically high, at 48.48, which really only highlights how far his output has slipped. In the last five years, he’s made three hundreds and averaged 34.24.

The thing to emphasise here is that five years is a long time. We spend quite a lot of time each day chatting to someone who hasn’t even been alive that long. (Sample topic: What if the rings of Saturn were made of icing.) We aren’t really in ‘form is temporary, class is permanent’ territory here, are we? If form isn’t yet permanent then it at least seems to have signed a multi-year fixed-term contract.

To get a handle on Kohli’s recent and honestly-not-all-that-recent output, let’s set his performance over those five years alongside some full careers to see what sort of company he’s been keeping.

• Virat Kohli: 34.24 (with 3 hundreds in 35 Tests)
• John Crawley: 34.61 (with 4 hundreds in 37 Tests)
• Lou Vincent: 34,15 (with 3 hundreds in 23 Tests)
• Wavell Hinds: 33.01 (with 5 hundreds in 45 Tests)
• Shaun Marsh: 34.31 (with 6 hundreds in 38 Tests)
• Alviro Petersen: 34.88 (with 5 hundreds in 36 Tests)
• Yuvraj Singh: 33.92 (with 3 hundreds in 40 Tests)
• KL Rahul: 33.87 (with 8 hundreds in 53 Tests)

While the ones further up frame things best, we thought those last two were interesting to include given what they say about (a) the influence of white ball performance and (b) Kohli’s current vulnerability to being dropped.

Fundamentally though, this is not good enough, is it? With all of India’s batting resources, the idea they’d enter a Test with, say, John Crawley and Alviro Petersen in their Test XI seems insane.

We’re pretty confident Kohli’s Test slump can be traced back to the exact moment he shot this ad.

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