Virat Kohli: County stint to cure off-stump woes ahead of England tour?

The weakness of Virat Kohli outside the off-stump, as evident in the manner of multiple dismissals in the recent Border-Gavaskar Trophy series, has emerged as one of the biggest talking points over the past week in post-mortems of India's performance in Australia. There is now a buzz that he may look for a short stint in county cricket to fine-tune his technique before India’s tour of England for a five-Test series from June.

A sports website has reported that there is such a possibility as the high-profile series, India’s first in the 2025-27 World Test Championship (WTC) cycle, is being seen by many as a last throw of the dice by the ageing master to prolong his red-ball career. However, a closer look at Kohli’s commitments during the first half of the year shows that such a stint may only be a very short one if at all — provided his franchise Royal Challengers Bengaluru releases him in the final phase of IPL 2025.

The first round of England's county championship ends on 26 May and resumes on 22 June, while the IPL final is scheduled for 25 May. The first India-England Test, meanwhile, begins on 20 June at Headingley, which means Kohli can at best squeeze in a few county matches should RCB either fail to make the play-offs or are willing to release their biggest asset in the home stretch of their campaign.

It remains to be seen whether Kohli, now 36 and in the last lap of his career, is willing to make such a move, but his desperation to end his lean phase and the fact that he is now a part-time UK resident adds fuel to the speculation. There has been an enduring legacy of India’s top batters spending time on the county circuit to polish their skills against the moving ball and cope with English conditions, but the advent of IPL has put paid to that practice.

Cheteshwar Pujara remains the only name among the current generation of big names who enjoys plying his trade there, as he has remained unsold in the IPL auction in recent times. Incidentally, the only other time Kohli made plans to turn out for a county club (Surrey) was in 2018, again ahead of India's England tour, but a neck injury took care of that plan. Not that it mattered in the end, as he emerged the highest scorer in the series with 593 runs.      

Meanwhile, in the avalanche of interviews and social media posts on Kohli, a chain of posts by Manoj Tiwary, a former international and one of the stalwarts of the country’s first class game, has stood out. The former Bengal captain and now West Bengal's minister for sports has stuck his neck out to offer a ‘remedy’ to the master batter in a series of X posts.

Quizzed by National Herald on his take on Kohli, Tiwary said: ‘’I have played the game at a decent level for more than 20 years and have tried to analyse what is going wrong with his initial movement — or a batter’s trigger movement as we call it — and tried to break it down for netizens. Sometimes, when you are playing for such a long period, some faults creep into your game, which even the best batters stay unaware of.’’

Elaborating on his posts, Tiwary — who has more than 10,000 first class runs to his credit — argued that in his anxiety to be back among runs, Kohli has brought about a number of changes to his stance as well as the back-and-cross movement, which is proving counter productive.

‘’Unlike in the past, when he would shuffle on top of the middle-stump to meet the pace bowler’s delivery, Kohli is now making an exaggerated trigger movement up to the top of the off-stump. From that position, he is attempting to play at deliveries outside the off-stump line, which he feels are closer to him than they actually are, thereby ending up nicking them. He has also opened up his left foot (the front foot for a right-hander) a bit more than before in trying to avoid playing across the line, but this is actually giving him less time to play his shots,’’ Tiwari offered.

‘’These are actually minor adjustments which, if pointed out, a man like Kohli can easily work on. He has made tons of runs for India and if you remember that in Perth in the second innings when the conditions improved for batting, he hung around for the century,’’ the plain-speaking Tiwary said.

The question is: who will now bell the cat?