Virat Kohli ended the ODI series against the West Indies with an average of 8.66, his second-worst in a bilateral series. Sarah Waris wonders if the modern great will ever regain his prime form again.

Kohli’s long wait for his 71st international hundred has his fans and followers of the game in all sorts of moods. A rough patch visits every athlete, but the larger-than-life players are always expected to work around those blips. They are always expected to conquer the workings of fate just like they have the best opponents on their best days. Having grown accustomed to watching them at their prime day in and day out, a resurgence out of the woods is always considered the norm, but what happens when the wait is so long that viewers start losing hope? As the bad patch soon starts becoming a phase, fear takes over, the mind constantly reminiscing the old days while thinking of a scary tomorrow where the favourite star might not repeat the past heroics anymore.

And so it is with Kohli. The batter, who scored 70 international hundreds in ten years, beating the best in their backyard, was destined for immortality. Touted to break the best of records, he was an all-format wonder, who wonderfully switched between conditions and adapted his game to suit the growing demands of cricket. With peak fitness levels, Kohli, the batter and the captain took over the reins wonderfully from Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni, respectively, going into a realm where no other India cricketer resided.

The three years from 2016 to 2018 were especially spectacular. Kohli churned out 29 international hundreds and 32 fifties in 140 innings, at an average of 73.40, making a 50-plus score every 2.29 innings. He scored 8,148 international runs in those three years, with Joe Root coming second with 6,600 runs. The batter with the next best average (min. 4,000 international runs scored) was Steve Smith, who scored 4,487 runs at an average of 53.41. Kohli scored six of his seven Test double centuries in this period and was also unstoppable in the IPL, making 1,811 in three seasons, including a freakish 973 runs with four hundreds in 2016.

2019 was not the worst either. Besides racking up 464 runs in the IPL along with a hundred against Kolkata Knight Riders, he also scored 2,455 international runs, averaging over 59 in all three formats. Until the end of 2018, Kohli had made 70 hundreds and 101 fifties, and little did anyone know that the conversion rate after 2019 would change so much.

His numbers aren’t really bad, but…

Since the start of 2020, ironically the same year the world itself started going into a downward spiral, Kohli averages less than 50 in T20Is (49.50), less than 40 in ODIs (39) and less than 30 in Tests (28.14). He has played 62 innings across formats, scoring 20 fifties, making a half-century every 3.1 innings. However, for a long time, experts shied away from saying that he was out of form: he was scoring crucial runs, and his overall impact was also hard to overlook.

He is the only player from India to score over 2,000 international runs since the start of 2020 and has the most fifties in this period as well. There were plenty of classy knocks; his innings of 74 against Australia in Adelaide, where he looked on for a big one before an unfortunate run out, his fighting 72 in the first Test against England at Chennai, his 66 against the same team in the ODIs after India lost two early wickets, a gutsy 50 against England at The Oval when India crumbled to 39-3, a 57 against Pakistan in the T20 World Cup after Shaheen Afridi’s memorable spell, and a restrained 79, where he cut down on the strokes outside off against South Africa in Cape Town. That was followed by two fifties in the ODIs: these knocks couldn’t have been off the blade of a totally out-of-form cricketer.

But though important runs are being scored, the lack of consistency, the trend of repeating mistakes and the inability to make the most of the chances when playing weaker sides has not been lost on many, and the recent series against West Indies shows that the picture is grimmer than what one would have hoped for.

The first ODI against the West Indies remains the prime example. Chasing 177 for a win, India got off to a flier, scoring 84 in 13 overs. Kohli, the Chase Master, would have looked to play until the end, but a strange innings, if it can be called that, was what followed. He began with a four that came of an outside edge as he looked to play leg-side, and smashed another un-Kohli like four, playing an uppercut off a short delivery that was outside off. Two balls later, a top edge accounted for his dismissal.

With growing struggles against deliveries outside off — he was out nine successive times caught behind in overseas Test matches, starting from the WTC final — Kohli’s unsuccessful attempts in rectification seems a bigger cause of concern. It’s not that he’s never struggled for runs in the past, but his ability to bounce back every single time made him stand out. His disastrous tour of England in 2014, where James Anderson constantly troubled him outside the off, saw Kohli return a bigger beast, scoring 692 runs in four Tests against Australia, deliberately cutting down on shots away from the body outside off, to show the champion mindset that he possessed.

That hunger is missing somewhere: it could either be, as Harsha Bhogle quipped on The Final Word Cricket Podcast, a result of chasing excellence for years and a natural saturation that comes with it, or a realisation that there is more to the world after the birth of his daughter. It could just be tiredness following the captaincy mess that he was embroiled in, which, Aakash Chopra, stated could have mentally worn him out. Or, it could just be the gradual decline that comes to every player, a period after the highest highs where the obstacles that were once easily surpassed demand more effort.

For his fans, there is always hope despite his comparative lack of recent scores. The Kohli of old did the unthinkable innumerable times, and the heart clings on to those memories. A roaring Kohli leaping into the air after a lull, embracing the vociferous cheers of everyone around. The train of criticism that followed, chatter about how he was far from being the ideal role model…The reality though presents a different picture — he seems worn out now, and with mistakes so many and runs so scarce, you begin to wonder whether he’ll ever be the beast of old again.