Virat Kohli, India and cricket are taken out of T20 by new-age big-hitters | Ipl news

For the better part of this month, a bunch of batting buccaneers – Travis Head, Heinrich Klaasen, Jos Buttler – have been making the Indians aware that while they were busy deifying their batting gods, the T20 format was far from the tree tumbled and fell. by. They are the disruptors. They normalize taboos and also make Kohli look inadequate.

It will be unfair to single out Kohli as there is no Indian batsman at the moment, including Rohit Sharma, who can pull off a power-hitting bat a la Head or Klaasen, which drives him crazy.

Royal Challengers Bengaluru batsman Virat Kohli reacts after his dismissal during the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 cricket match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, Monday, April 15, 2024. (PTI Photo)

Passing the bat was once a virtue for an opener. Keeping the wickets in hand for an all-out attack later was a tried and tested white-ball tactic. Coaches and commentators insisted on rotating the strike and changing the strike into two. Run making graphs had to be reverse clocks: fast-slow-fast. That all seems archaic, so 90s.

Recently, Kohli has ticked all those ODI boxes. He played a classic white-ball innings against Rajasthan Royals. Started as an opener, he remained unbeaten on 113 (72 balls, Strike Rate 156). He helped RCB to reach 183/3. Rajat Patidar and Dinesh Karthik didn't get a chance to bat.

Batting first, the opener not out, the specialist batsman not getting a chance and the team failing to reach par – this is a fatal sequence in modern T20. RCB would pay for it. RR would gallop to a win. Kohli should have read the winds of change. With 7 wickets in hand, he could have thrown caution to the wind.

With bowlers becoming increasingly irrelevant to T20s, the only foolproof plan that works is to beat the rivals. Sun Risers Hyderabad (SRH) have cracked the math of posting a big score this season. Head and Klaasen are the masterminds. The two foreigners think like high rollers in a casino, but are meticulous in their planning.

Against RCB, SRH scored IPL's highest total of 287. Head doesn't carry any ODI baggage into T20 matches. He is fully aware that this was a format where 11 players get to share 20 overs, and he seems to have a death wish after surviving the first powerplay.

Royal Challengers Bengaluru player Virat Kohli during a warm-up session before the start of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 cricket match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad, at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, Monday, April 15, 2024. ( PTI Photo)

In the 12th over he hit 4 fours to reach his 100 and the next over he was out, caught on the fence attempting another six. He made 102 off 41 balls, much faster than Kohli's 72-ball 113. In the middle overs, Kohli had gone into ODI mode. He did what Tendulkar would do in the 1990s: milking singles in the 25s to 40s. He hit just one six in the range of 10 to 15 overs.

Meanwhile, Klaasen's T20 approach is much more developed than even Head. Klaasen says he barely jogs 40 meters after the match against RCB and his gym training is also limited. His training regime is in contrast to Kohli's.

Klaasen's training methods are utilitarian. Bat swing and mental peace – are his two main concerns. To optimize his swing, the South African looks to baseball. T20 coaches these days are busy peeling back the layers of cricket to strip it down to its basic core. They have understood that it all comes down to the swinging bat, which holds the ball in the middle to send it over the fence. This simple pursuit has brought T20 cricket closer to baseball – the much more scientifically analyzed sport. That's why out-of-box thinking coaches like Julian Wood can be seen in dugouts of national and franchise teams.

IPL 2024 Orange Cap: Heinrich Klaasen moved to third spot on Tuesday. (BCCI)

Wood calls himself a power hitting coach. The homepage of his website states the following lines: “After spending a lot of time in the US observing the training methods and biomechanics associated with baseball, Julian has devised his own proprietary, cricket-specific training program…. ” Its sound is very different from India's. batting coach Vikram Rathore and Virat's mentor since childhood Rajkumar Sharma.

This ideological battle duel between Kohli and Klaasen is another of the many old and new tug-of-war that are part of every churn. The traditionalists' grip may be loosening, but they are still in the game. The World T20 will start in the US in about a month. The marketers and the pirates will unite to announce T20's independence from cricket and declare it a republic where the traditionalists will look like outsiders. Here's hoping Kohli rotates the strike, converts ones into twos, keeps the wickets in hand and, as only Ravi Shastri says, finishes it off in style. Everything for the sake of cricket.

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