To understand why Kohli stands out among Indian Test captains, it is important to understand the team’s performances before him.

To begin with, Kohli led India to 40 Test wins – the fourth-most in Test cricket history and 13 clear of any other Indian captain. He also led in 17 defeats, which puts his win-loss at 2.352. With a 10-match cut-off, his successor Rohit Sharma comes a distant second, with 1.714.

In fact, when he stepped down after a stint of seven years and a bit, Kohli had led India to nearly a quarter of their Test match wins (166).

India had played Test cricket for more than 82 years until Kohli. They did not win a Test match until 1951-52, or an overseas Test match until 1967-68. Indian fans were not used to their side winning Test matches, let alone series, away from home. There were victories, but they were not frequent enough for them to be hailed as an all-time great side.

Until Kohli took over, India had won only 38 Tests away from home – but that count flatters them. Six of these came in Bangladesh; three in Zimbabwe; three in New Zealand in 1967-68, at that point the weakest Test-playing nation; and two in Australia in 1977-78, when Kerry Packer had signed up more than two full-fledged XIs and a quadragenarian Bobby Simpson had to come out of retirement to lead them.

If we excludes these, India’s overseas win count in the pre-Kohli era comes down to 24. Under Kohli, India added 16 to that tally (18 if one includes the two wins under Ajinkya Rahane, who led in Kohli’s absence in Australia in 2020-21).

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None of these was against a weak opposition. Of course, five of his 16 overseas wins came in Sri Lanka (2-1 in 2015, 3-0 in 2017), against a side going through transition. But at home, Sri Lanka beat Australia 3-0 in 2016 and South Africa 2-0 in 2018 – and even swept Pakistan 2-0 in the UAE in 2017-18 and South Africa 2-0 in South Africa in 2018-19.

India won 18 consecutive Test series between 2012-13 and 2024-25. Their streak stretched beyond Kohli’s stint on either side. He led India in 11 of these series and Rahane in one more.

But then, it can always be argued that a captain can only be as good as the side. “Leadership skills” – the phrase is vague to begin with –cannot convert an ordinary side into a champion outfit. So what did Kohli really do?

Shifting the focus

However strong the batting may be, India could not win Test matches without taking 20 wickets, and for that, you need bowlers. And outside the subcontinent, they need fast bowlers. If Kohli’s predecessors had understood this, the implementation had not been evident.

From his first series as full-time captain, in Sri Lanka in 2015, Kohli made it evident that he wanted an extra bowler even if that meant weakening the batting. India could afford to do that with Kapil Dev, Ravi Shastri, and Manoj Prabhakar until the early 1990s, but seldom since then.

Kohli changed India’s six-batter XIs from the onset. Of course, it was easier to begin with. He could pick Jayant Yadav to go with R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja (years later, Axar Patel would replace Jayant). Hardik Pandya was an excellent fit for “SENA” countries.

By 2018, India was playing Pandya and four bowlers. In the third Test in South Africa in 2017-18, India – shrugged off the image of a nation of batters and spinners – fielded five fast bowlers. And won.

By the end of that year, India won a Test series in Australia for the first time. At Perth, they picked four fast-bowling rank tail-enders, though that backfired. Ishant Sharma, Mohammed Shami, and Jasprit Bumrah shared 130 wickets that year, equalling the world record by a fast-bowling trio in a calendar year.

Back home, India switched to spin and kept winning, often clean-sweeping, one series after another.

Two years later, India were bowled out for 36 at Adelaide. Kohli left after that Test, but not before a meeting with Rahane and the coaching staff. Of the several changes, perhaps the most significant was replacing Kohli with Jadeja. Yet again, there was a focus on boosting the bowling at the cost of batting. India famously won the series.

In England in 2021, India wanted four fast bowlers yet again. For that, they left out Ashwin, the top-ranked spinner in the world, for four Tests in a row. It was a tactic that infuriated many, but Kohli stuck to his decision. The series stood at 2-1 in India’s favour when it had to be postponed after a COVID-19 outbreak: by the time it resumed, India had a new captain. England squared the series.

‘The greatest team on the planet’

India had seldom featured among the greatest fielding sides. It did not seem to matter in cricket, primarily a skill-based sport that did not demand the conventional fitness levels as some other sports. Kohli set out to change that.

Bowling was, of course, going to be instrumental towards his dream of making India “the greatest team on the planet”, but he also wanted India to be “the fittest team”. Of course, the great advancements in sports science helped. In the Kohli era, Indian international cricketers now have to score 17:1 in the yo-yo test or run two kilometres in eight and a quarter minutes (fast bowlers got a concession).

These stringent standards were criticised, even ridiculed, but his record, particularly away from home, validated his approach.

‘Unless we try, how will we know how good we are?’

Kohli stepped in to lead India for the first time at Adelaide in 2014-15. When Australia led by 364 at stumps on day four of that game, Kohli’s mind had been made up: “No matter what target they set us, we are going to chase it down.”

“You can chase down this total, you are that kind of a player and we all know that,” reminded MS Dhoni, for whom Kohli was filling in. “But as captain, you will also have to think about what the others are capable of ... Can they do it? Are the other batters capable of playing that positively and attempting to chase down 360 on the final day of a Test match?”

“We have not chased 360 on the last day of a Test match ever before because we haven’t yet tried to do that,” came the response. “Let us try and give it a shot. Unless we try, how will we know how good we are?”

Three years ago, Dhoni had been happy to shake hands with Daren Sammy at Roseau when India needed 86 in 90 balls with seven wickets in hand. At Adelaide, India rode on Kohli’s 141 and M Vijay’s 99 to reach 242-2 after Australia declared overnight. They did not shut shop even at 304-7, when Kohli fell. They were bowled out for 315.

At The Oval in 2018, India were set an even steeper target, of 464 in a day and an hour’s cricket. They reached 58-3 at stumps and became 121-5 on the last morning, but KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant kept the chase going. In a near-encore of Adelaide, they added 204, did not give up at any point, and lost.

The two failed chases set the blueprint of India’s subsequent approach towards high-risk batting, which became evident at Port of Spain in 2023 and at Kanpur in 2024.

Kohli had changed the traditional safety-first approach of Indian cricket to a high-risk one. Under him, India began to take more risks than ever on a sustained basis in order to chase victory – sometimes with the bat, often with the ball, almost always with selections.

And the results showed.

Kohli was the first Indian captain under whom fans began to take Test match wins for granted, for he had successfully transformed the Indian side whose overseas triumphs were celebrated into one whose overseas defeats began to be granted.

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