Samurai Virat at the World Cup

It’s just as well that RCB concluded their league engagements with a win, and points that don’t look as bad as they threatened to, when the team lost six games on the trot at the beginning of the IPL 2019 season. What happens to RCB as a team would be monumentally irrelevant if the team was not captained by Virat Kohli, the talismanic captain of the Indian Cricket Team, and more importantly, the most feared batsman in the world, across all formats, and in all the countries where the game is played. Take Virat out of the scene, and globally, the game loses big – big money, big crowds and big interest in the game.

 What effect has this demeaning loss as captain of RCB had on the mind of Virat Kohli?

When brutally injured in a relatively smaller skirmish, how does a warrior go on to the next, huge battle that is comparatively, inter-galactic in size and scope?

 Or, should we simply discount the IPL as a mere tamasha (a circus) and expect a professional like Virat to effortlessly up his game for the World Cup? Philosopher Immanuel Kant, in The Critique of Practical Reason, say: “It’s surprising that men, otherwise acute, can think it possible to distinguish between higher and lower desires….. and place them in some expected pleasantness; it is of no consequence whence the idea of this pleasing object is derived, but only how much it pleases.”

 In effect, Kant says Virat can do it, but there is some work to do. He must hurt from IPL, let that hurt teach him leadership lessons, and show the improved effects on his World Cup captaincy. To professional Virat, non-performance in IPL cannot be less important than being below par at the World Cup.

If you are the Captain, you play with the team you have got. We get that. At the World Cup, it is a different team, a different arena, a different prize to fight for, different set of competency levels you are pitted against. Add a different Captain, who has processed his baggage well, and we should have magic happening.

As the oft-quoted lines of Alexander the Great go: “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”

The opposition has made a good note of Virat’s discomfiture with RCB this season.

One is concerned about Virat’s behaviour on the IPL field while the team was collapsing all around him, game after game. Did he pick up the gauntlet? Did he do something radically different? Did he get even more animated than his usual self because things were going downhill more often than not? Nope. Never. He was mostly fielding closer to the boundary ropes, simply shaking his head occasionally, with many displays of resignation at the crumbling edifice called RCB.

 A true professional like Virat sets standards for himself that pleases himself. He rarely distinguishes between club cricket and Test cricket. When on show, he has to be at his best.

As a professional, Virat knows, more than anyone else in the current Indian team, that if you don’t respect The Game on occasions, The Game will occasionally not respect you. Virat the Captain went missing at many of the times he was most needed, at the IPL.

 As sports is war by other means, let’s take a leaf out of the samurai warriors’ text The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi: “Timing is important in dancing and pipe or string music, for they are in rhythm only if timing is good….In all skills and abilities there is timing.... There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord.”

Timing in showing up, speaking up, stepping up, timing to dip into your inner reservoirs of strength, confidence and resolve – let’s hope Samurai Virat, going into the World Cup, has not let the IPL blunt these important capabilities.