"As Long As Virat Kohli Is In The Team RCB Can't Win IPL Trophy"

Virat Kohli’s approach while batting first in T20 cricket has been perhaps the most debated topic in world cricket over the past few years. Kohli, the leading run-scorer in T20I and IPL history, gets criticized for his strike rate and tempo when his side bats first in the shortest format on good batting surfaces.

Earlier, barely anyone used to question his place in the side and modus operandi in T20 cricket. But with the rapid growth of the game that’s tilted toward the batters, and the fact that teams are not intimidated anymore to go after big targets, Kohli’s approach when batting first has come under the microscope. So much so that even a portion, though small, of RCB fans themselves have turned against their main man.

For the second season in a row, RCB fans have expressed their displeasure at the strike rate, approach, and blueprint of Kohli’s batting.

T20 Template of Virat Kohli while batting first in chase-friendly venues is debatable

"As Long As Virat Kohli Is In The Team RCB Can't Win IPL Trophy"

Take the example of three home matches of RCB where Kohli produced knocks that would seduce the fans with his shots, and scores that boosted his average, but remain questionable when you look at it from an objective point of view.

Last season, RCB needed a win in their last league game, against the Gujarat Titans, to qualify for the playoffs. Kohli scored 101* (61), at a strike rate of 165, as RCB posted 197. In the chase, Shubman Gill produced a century of his own—104* off 52, at a strike rate of 200—and knocked RCB out of the playoff race.

Getting 182, batting first at Bangalore, is like going Louis Vuitton shopping with 20K in pocket. It’s never going to be enough.
— Sanjay Manjrekar (@sanjaymanjrekar) March 30, 2024

This season, in IPL 2024, while Kohli did score 77 (49) (strike rate 157) against the Punjab Kings in a successful run-chase, it needed a thunderous flourish of 48* (18) from Karthik and Lomror to take RCB over the line with only four balls to spare. After an ultra-attacking start, Kohli slowed down and couldn’t stay till the end to finish off the chase.

In the next game against KKR, batting first, Kohli scored 83 (59) (strike rate of 140). He began aggressively against Starc and Narine, but once he slowed down, perhaps looking to bat through the innings this time, he couldn’t pick his momentum back up: Kohli managed to score only 21 runs in the last 16 balls he faced.

RCB, with the help of Karthik’s three sixes in 8 balls, reached 182, which was comfortably gunned down by KKR in 16.4 overs as openers Salt and Narine blasted 86 runs in 39 balls before Venkatesh Iyer cracked a 30-ball 50.

While Kohli’s fans argue that the batter is often carrying the batting line-up when others fail around him, and that is one of the reasons for his slowdown and lowering of strike rate, the other side believes that Kohli should continue to attack and look to up the run rate considering RCB has a poor bowling attack and that the Chinnaswamy is a very chasing-friendly venue.

The second party opined that with RCB’s bowling attack and Chinnaswamy’s chase-friendly nature, it would be prudent for Kohli to not look to simply drag RCB to 170-180 because they are unlikely to defend it anyway at this venue, and instead, he should go after the bowlers harder and aim for 210, regardless of whether he’s losing partners at the other end.

Modern T20 dictates that you are better off getting bowled out for 160 in the pursuit of amassing 220 rather than making 180 and still losing the match. When you have a bowling attack like RCB’s and when the venue is as chase-favouring as the Chinnaswamy is, it makes more sense, at least from the outside, to go for boom and risk getting busted than play timidly because a loss is a very likely result in this case.

After the embarrassing loss against KKR, an RCB fan outside the Chinnaswamy claimed, “As long as Virat Kohli in team we can’t win any trophy.”