Virat Kohli’s century drought is bound to end in South Africa, writes Rohit Sankar.

The BCCI may as well have ended their now-notorious, Twitter-character-limit-approved press release line on the ODI captaincy change with #cancelViratKohli. Even with social media swimming in a sea of cancel culture, this was as brutal a cancellation as any.

To cancel Virat Kohli is to basically turn on a timer and wait until he retorts. Don’t take my word for it, ask any journalist who has attended a Virat Kohli presser in the last few years. Admittedly, Kohli is among the few who can stop the majority of the journalists on Zoom to not scroll up and down their social media or WhatsApp chats. There’s a reason why. More often than not, there’s a dramatic, headline-grabbing Kohli response to a jibe or a piece of criticism that we are waiting to jump upon.

Days after the captaincy announcement, Kohli turned up at the pre-tour press conference and promptly sent people on news desks to open up three tabs of Google docs. The bottom line: you just don’t rub Virat Kohli the wrong way. He has answers, words, and the following to turn it back onto you. Always.

Except, now, he is on a century drought for more than two years, which among the majority of the Indian fans is as big a sin as any you can commit. You can’t be a darling of Indian cricket and not score hundreds.

Kohli must return to his old habit soon. He may need it to keep his job as Test captain and also win back the section of Noughties fans who romanticised over the macho avatar of Sourav Ganguly. And there’s no better place for it than South Africa.

Three years ago, Kohli, leading a revolutionary Indian Test side on a difficult overseas tour, turned to the raucous crowd at the Bull Ring in the Wanderers and asked them to zip it. He knew what he was doing. His team had lost the series, but he had made runs, a mind-blowingly good hundred, and the team put out a statement-making win in the final match of the series on a wicket seemingly made square by square under the supervision of the South African quicks.

The tide has turned in recent times against Kohli even with India’s reputation as a Test unit going through the roof. Leaks of supposed internal rifts aside, the lack of runs, which previously was never an issue, gave his detractors the perfect opening to give it back.

Every fourth-stump nick was followed by a dagger into his backside. Every ‘caught someone, bowled James Anderson’ was seen as writing on the wall. Meanwhile, Rohit Sharma pieced together his flailing Test career after flinching at the very sight of a white jersey for years. Ravi Shastri’s contract ended and India lost their first World Cup game to Pakistan. The timing was impeccable. The pieces were laid out perfectly to dethrone the King.

It’s hard to think that Kohli will hold onto the Test captaincy, despite his stellar role in India’s race to the top, if the ordinary run of form continues.

Luckily, the board has just done enough to irk Kohli and wake up the beast in him. We are in South Africa, where he averages 55.8 with the bat in Tests, where he turned up and scored the most runs by anyone in a bilateral ODI series, and where he announced to the world that this Indian Test team under him could fight in alien conditions. We go to the Centurion for the first Test on Boxing Day, the venue where he smashed one of his best-ever Test hundreds in 2018.

The stars are aligned perfectly for a scornful Kohli to make a mockery of South Africa’s world-beating fast bowling attack on a green mamba. In these two years, the 71st international hundred has never appeared this irresistible, the outside edge never further away. You can hate the man and his attitude, but c’mon, you, like me, know the familiar Kohli backlash is coming. It has to.