Virat Kohli has quit as T20 captain

Virat Kohli has decided to step down from the Indian T20 cricket team captaincy post the ICC T20 World cup in October 2021. He would be a part of the T20 team in the capacity of a batsmen thereafter and Rohit Sharma would be taking over the reins of the captaincy from Kohli. There have been speculations ever since the abandonment of the fifth test against England regarding Kohli’s stepping down from T20 captaincy but nothing was concrete. Upon asking BCCI even denied these rumors of split captaincy and reinforced the Kohli would continue to be the captain of all three formats. But, today Virat Kohli officially announced through his Twitter handle that he would be stepping down as T20 captain post the world cup to manage workload.

 

There has been continued pressure from many quarters on Virat Kohli for his record in ICC tournaments as Indian captain. The fact that Indian won any major ICC tournament last under Dhoni’s captaincy and a world class T20 captain in the form of Rohit Sharma being present in the dressing room gave people lots to ponder about. This must have been playing on the mind of Virat Kohli as well.

On the family and personal life front, Virat Kohli and wife Anushka Sharma recently has a newborn baby. With additional responsibilities of a father, he would certainly want to spend some time with his family and would give more time discharging a father’s responsibilities.

 

While Virat has forfeited the T20 captaincy he would continue to be captain in the Test and ODI format. This would be interesting to see since usually in the case of split captaincy the test captain and white ball captain are different. If Virat only wants to step down as T20 captain and wants to remain as the ODI captain, this might throw up some challenges in the near future. Some examples of split captaincy are Joe Root and Eoin Morgan for England test and white ball sides, Jason Holder and Keiron Pollard for West Indies, Tim Paine and Aron Finch for Australia respectively. This is a more structured way of segregating test and white balls team leadership since the format of T20 and ODIs aren’t very different and usually the teams don’t have many changes as well. It will be interesting to see how Indian cricket team leadership and BCCI decide to go about this.

 

The good news being, we have a highly capable replacement in the form of Rohit Sharma in the team. He is probably a better white ball leader than Virat Kohli considering the IPL performances of both Virat Kohli led RCB and Rohit Sharma led MI. MI has won IPL five times while RCB has failed to make any impact in the tournament and haven’t won any titles. Also, we have a really settled side with lots of experience and class, a change in leadership would not make much of a difference in short term performance.