5 Key Observations About Virat Kohli’s Match-Winning Knock vs PBKS

In his second game of the IPL 2024 season, Virat Kohli brought out one of his best T20 knocks on Monday night at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium to hammer 77 runs in 49 balls against Punjab Kings.

This knock from Kohli, followed by an excellent finish from Dinesh Karthik and Mahipal Lomror, helped RCB to their first win of the season as they gunned down the target of 177 with four balls to spare.

3 Big Talking Points From Virat Kohli’s Thunderous Knock vs PBKS:

1. Firstly, Kohli shakes off the rust after being away for a long time

Firstly, this knock will have helped Virat Kohli shake off the rust after being away from the game for two months. Before the IPL, Kohli had been on a break for the birth of his child and missed the entire Test series against England.

On return, he scored 21 (20) against CSK in Chennai, and didn’t look comfortable in his stay. In this game, though, he was mostly fluent. Apart from a couple of outside edges on the first two balls of his innings, Kohli was simply sublime.

2. Ultra-aggressive start

Kohli has adopted a refreshing approach in T20 cricket this year. We saw it during one of his brief knock against Afghanistan earlier this year. And now, too, the 35-year-old came all guns blazing against PBKS. After one lucky edged boundary on the second ball, he collected three more fours in the first over, off Sam Curran.

Kohli then creamed Rabada and Arshdeep for more boundaries. He cracked 8 fours in his first 15 deliveries and scored 33 runs – the most number of runs he’s scored in the first 15 balls of any of his T20 innings. And he attacked 11 balls in the powerplay – again the most he’s done in T20 cricket, according to ESPNcricinfo.

3. Holding the innings even when losing partners

It was one of those T20 games where Kohli looked to be batting on another pitch and his batting partners on another. While Kohli reeled a flurry of boundaries and looked mostly flawless after a slight early hiccup, his batting partners couldn’t either time their shots properly, or missed the ball entirely. None of the five of the top six RCB batters managed to score more than 20. Green, Maxwell, and Du Plessis each scored 3 runs and Patidar scored 18 off 18.

It was not the typical Chinnaswamy flat pitch, and while Kohli made it look like so, his batting partners struggled.

4. Uppish shots show Kohli continues to upskill his T20 batting

Kohli is adding more strings to his bow, and it was evident with his uppish shots against Rabada and Arshdeep. Rabada had dismissed Kohli thrice in 24 balls prior to this game. But the RCB star stepped down and drove Rabada over the offside fielders; he did the same to Arshdeep. This messed up their lengths a bit.

5. No middle-overs slowdown this time; Kohli keeps foot on the peddle even after the powerplay

One of the major criticisms about Virat Kohli has been his slowdown in the middle-overs after the powerplay. However, in this innings, he took the bowlers head-on.

Since the start of 2020, his middle-overs strike rate in the IPL is 117. However, in this innings he batted at a strike rate of 150 in the middle phase, which meant the required rate never went too far from RCB.

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