It’s time we talk about Virat Kohli’s captaincy

The madness that’d occurred 24 hours ago, particularly after both Rohit and Pandya holed out in the deep after getting clean connections, was equated to being a largely ‘Sharjah’ thing. Even the RCB fans, who are pessimists of the highest order and thrive on self-deprecation, at this point, were confident that they had the game in the bag, and the live match-thread on r/cricket was in unanimous agreement that Pollard & Co. were playing the NRR game. 

Naturally, the blame will fall on the RCB bowlers. After all, they have been the saviours of Twitter stand-up comedians for quite a few years now: The “RCB death bowling” concept has been milked by comics more than ‘engineering’ and that says something. But do RCB have a deeper problem at hand? Would the Dubai implosion on Monday have happened in the first place if it were for some competent captaincy?

The RCB skipper, by then, astoundingly, had used up 6 of the 8 overs of his go-to death bowlers Saini and Udana, meaning the only bowlers he could turn to bowl 50% of the final 4 overs was either his leg-spinners Chahal and Zampa or part-timer Shivam Dube, who’d infamously conceded 23 off the final over in RCB’s previous game. 

In essence, through his decision making (or tactical incompetency if you may call it), Kohli ensured that he was between the devil and the deep blue sea and his side, driven into a corner. Mumbai, Pollard and Kishan needed no invitations: 49 came off the two overs bowled by the leg-spinners, as compared to just the 30 bowled by the pacers, and they, almost convincingly, batted their way to a tie. But would Mumbai have even had a sniff had the bowlers been rotated properly?

What was more unfathomable about Kohli’s decision was that he did what he did despite his own teammates admitting a week ago that the dew in this very ground made the ball like a cake of soap. At 83/4 after 12 overs, with both Chahal and Zampa having bowled two overs each, the RCB skipper had a golden opportunity to both strangle the batsmen with spin - Kishan, in particular, who at that point had not struck a single boundary off spin - and save his spinners from the wrath of the dew.

But, instead, he then, mind-numbingly, brought back his supposed ‘specialist death bowler’ Isuru Udana to bowl the 3rd over of his spell in just the 13th over of the chase. There was simply no logic behind it; Pollard is known to be a fidgety starter against express pace, not military medium. To draft in a specialist death bowler to solve your death bowling woes and not bowl him at the death is naive, to say the least. 

RCB can only hope that Kohli reflects and ‘at least’ learns from this mistake, as he did with Washington Sundar. Kohli, smartly, against Mumbai, utilized three overs of Sundar in the powerplay, but it says something that it took the RCB skipper two and a half years to realize that the off-spinner could be a useful entity in the powerplay. Last season, RCB conceded more runs per game in the powerplay than all teams but Punjab, yet Kohli utilized Sundar inside the first six overs just once, despite the youngster having maintained an ER of 6.56 with Pune prior to his move to Bangalore. In the first two matches of this season, too, Sundar bowled a total of just 3 overs, all outside the powerplay. 

The first three matches of this season have already been a damning indictment of Kohli the RCB skipper: from not utilizing his resources properly to chopping and changing individuals according to his mood-swings to making questionable selections to deploying tactics without considering their long-term implications, we’ve already been given a glimpse of all-things-wrong about Kohli the captain. As it stands, his withering form with the bat should be the least of concerns for the RCB side.