For a moment, imagine you are back in 2019. It has been a stressful day and you switch on the television to see Virat Kohli batting on 50 off some 60-odd balls. You quietly smile to yourself, knowing what is about to come; the perfect storm of cricket’s most aesthetic shots hit with immense power and yet dripping with royal grace. Now imagine a random dude telling you that in three years’ time, hugs would be a thing of the past, face masks will move from cosplay to the daily essentials section and Virat Kohli would be dropped from the Indian team due to one dismal performance after another. 

No better place to start than the little master himself, Sachin Tendulkar. Firstly, there were only two years in which the great did not score a century in international cricket throughout his 24-year career– his debut year in 1989 and then in 1991. Moreover, since Sachin scored his first ODI century in 1994, not a year went by till his retirement in 2012 in which he did not register at least one hundred in the 50-over format. In the same time frame, only once did his ODI average in a year fall below 30. The years 2005 and 2006 were the batsman’s worst slump in form, but the maestro still managed to accumulate over 1,700 runs in international cricket averaging a decent 35. This is barring his twilight years of 2012 and 2013, where a nearly 40-year-old Tendulkar was still somehow scoring runs at an okayish rate by most standards.

Now let’s move on to Australian legend Ricky Ponting. Since 1996, only twice in 16 years of Test cricket did his annual average fall below 35. In 1998, when he belted nearly 1,200 runs in ODIs across 24 innings at a stunning average of 53, and in his penultimate year of playing in 2011, in which he averaged over 40 in ODIs across 15-plus innings. His biggest struggle in terms of centuries came in 2004 as he managed no hundreds across 34 matches in red and white ball cricket, but still averaged an overall 39.41 with 12 half-centuries. Throughout his career there were no marked slums, simply very temporary drops not even lasting a year. 

For a fairer comparison, let’s finally take a present-era cricketer as a data sample in the form of Joe Root. The former England skipper simply has exemplary numbers in Tests, with his lowest average in a calendar year being a respectable 37 in 2019. In fact, 2020 was the only year after his debut year in which Root did not score a Test hundred and it could be termed as his worst year on the international stage so far. Across 18 innings in Tests and ODIs, he could only rack up 570 runs at an average of 35.63. That was the beginning of his decline in white-ball cricket and it has only steepened ever since but at the same time, 2021 and 2022 were the top-order batter’s most prolific years against the red-ball. Thus, the downward spiral in ODIs merely seems a question of match practice and preference rather than poor form at large.

What exacerbates these statistics, even more, are his ungodly returns in the three immediately preceding years. In 2017, ‘18 and ‘19, Kohli racked up over 1,000 runs each year in ODIs alone, with his average across Tests and ODIs an astronomical 71.75. Another indicator of his downfall is the IPL numbers. Since 2012, Kohli had never had a strike rate below 120 until 2021, and then again in 2022. His average across these two years in the league? 25.72.

To conclude, Virat Kohli is fast losing grip over his stake on the title of the greatest batsman to have played the game from a numbers point of view. None of the other contenders for that bold honour has had anywhere close to a slump like Kohli’s, never mind the fact being publicly discussed as often. The fact that he still has the most 50s in international cricket since November 2019 barring Babar Azam is no consolation given the potential limits of the great talent he possesses. The trajectory of worrying over Virat Kohli’s form went quickly from him not being able to convert his runs to a century, to the overall lack of runs across all forms of cricket.