View: This one reason for Kohli resignation as Test captain has been ignored

How often has an international cricket captain won the first Test and then withdrawn from the second of a three-match affair and that too on an overseas tour where his country has never won a series before? Virat Kohli won the first Test at Centurion on the latest tour and then withdrew from the second match at Johannesburg due to back spasms. Since after the Centurion victory, a win at Joburg would have got India a first-time Test series win in South Africa, it would be logical to assume that the back spasm was serious enough to not just keep the very competitive Kohli out of the second Test but perhaps even cast a shadow on his cricketing future.

The question could be asked why, if the back was the problem, Kohli resigned only from the captaincy and not five-day Test cricket itself. The answer is simple. It is far easier for a player to drop out when a back problem suddenly flares up. Whereas a captain cannot repeatedly keep dropping out, especially during tough overseas tours. It would, therefore, be logical to assume that the back problem which saw Kohli dropping out of the second Test at Joburg and K L Rahul leading the team, could also have precipitated the Virat captaincy-resignation after the Test series.

The difficulty with back problems is that they flare up suddenly and unexpectedly. Remember the first Adelaide Test on India’s 2014-15 tour, when the then 33-year-old Aussie skipper Michael Clarke ducked inside an Ishant Sharma bouncer, sank to his knees, tried with the help of medics to loosen his back muscles, and than, after indicating that he had a problem in turning his upper body, retired hurt with his individual score at 60, subsequently resuming the innings and going on to score a century.

Clarke, of course, had three degenerative discs in his lower back, something indicated when he underwent his first scan at the age of 17. He has been quoted in his autobiography as saying that there were days during his cricketing career when he could not perform the simplest of tasks. “Mornings were,” Clake recalls, “the hardest. Putting shoes and socks on in the morning was the toughest part of my day. A lot of times, I’d get Kyly (the then wife) to put my shoes and socks on and, by 10 am, I was walking out to bat for Australia.”

Coming back to the January 3, 2022, Johannesburg Test, what the BCCI referred to as “upper-back spasms” is something which Virat Kohli has had in the past. In the summer of 2018, Kohli wanted to play county cricket for Surrey to get used to English conditions before that year’s subsequent Test tour of England. There was a PTI report that he was advised no to do so because of a “herniated disc” (slip disc). PTI adds that he was then advised that surgery was not needed then since it could keep him out of the game for a few months. During the 2021 tour of England, there was a report that Kolhi had been advised to skip a preparatory match against a select county eleven because of a back problem.

However, there is a fundamental difference between a preparatory match (for or against a county team) and a crucial must-win match on an overseas tour of South Africa where India has never won a Test-series before. Maybe the back problem is serious enough now for him to give up the Test captaincy while continuing as a player. A player can miss a Test now and then but it is very unsettling for a captain to do so, especially during a hard-fought overseas tour.

The facts are that Team India’s two best batsmen Kohli and Rohit Sharma have reached an age where fitness issues can and do crop up. Shortly after it was announced that Rohit Sharma would be the vice-captain for the Test series in South Africa and as skipper for the subsequent ODI games, he had to drop out of the entire South African tour because of a recurring hamstring problem. Rohit will be 35 in April and Kohli will be 34 in November.

It would help if the BCCI was more transparent, especially on the health issues facing players. It is the absence of this transparency which leads to unwanted speculative conspiracy-theories which say that the captaincy-resignation was a case of Kohli jumping ship before he was pushed off by the BCCI.

Granted, when the BCCI president Sourav Ganguly stated that he had asked Kohli not to announce his retirement as India’s T20 skipper before last November’s World Cup in the UAE, Virat, while responding to a query at a December press-conference before leaving for the South African tour, did maintain that he had never been spoken to on this issue. However, to infer from just this that the Test-captaincy resignation was not voluntary but enforced is fair to neither Kohli nor Ganguly. If during his days of leading Team India in Tests and ODIs, Ganguly was called Dada (Begali for elder brother), it was purely in an affectionate sense and because he constantly encouraged the younger players like Yuvraj, Zaheer and Harbhajan.