'Every ball is an intense event': Kohli on T20's new world

This past weekend in Raipur, RCB needed a win quite badly. They'd lost two on the trot after a strong start to the season and the pack behind them had bunched up. A third straight loss, against Mumbai Indians, had the potential to genuinely derail their title defence. What followed was the kind of game that reminds you why people watch: Krunal Pandya, cramping and barely upright in the final overs, batting RCB home in a chase that looked increasingly unlikely. In the dugout, Virat Kohli, who had made a duck, was at his animated best, yelping and leaping in celebration.

It is worth sitting with that image for a moment. Kohli has won big Tests, World Cups, Champions Trophy, an IPL title. In fact, he pocketed three titles in a 12-month period last year. This was, for all practical purposes, just another IPL league game.

There's been an evolution in how Kohli thinks about all of this . "I started off thinking of trophies as accolades and achievements," he tells the RCB Podcast (watch here). "But at the end of the day, why do people get so involved and engrossed, say for a semi-final or a final? I think the opportunity to win a competition in itself feels like a very difficult thing to achieve, right? And when it's difficult and people feel like it might or might not happen, the connection and the intensity with which they watch goes 10 levels higher.

"While you are playing and you are creating an impact, because so many people are watching together, it's not only about winning the trophy, it's about what they feel when they watch you play.

"Even though you haven't contributed in the game, the impact you feel as a spectator when I'm watching from the dugout - I'm feeling those emotions when I'm watching a Krunal play under pressure. And that just creates an energy inside you which is very difficult to explain. You feel like there's a buzz again, you feel like, oh man, this was phenomenal. I feel inspired looking at these kinds of moments."

The game Kohli is watching from that dugout, of course, is not quite the game he grew up in. He and KL Rahul were talking about it recently. "He said, it feels like a different game altogether. It's not even a different format. Because every ball is an intense event. The momentum can shift in every ball of the game. It's almost like you're playing a high-intensity Champions League football game where one bad pass or one slip and the whole competition is done," Kohli says.

The teenagers arriving in this competition are a different species from what came before, and Kohli says that with genuine admiration. "The talent is through the roof. Their hand-eye coordination and the confidence they have in those abilities is outstanding. It's lovely for people to watch. It's great for the game."

The logical conclusion of all that - the pace, the power, the fearlessness of the younger generation - might appear to suggest that the page has turned on the old generation. And still players like Kohli, Krunal and Bhuvneshwar Kumar - each of them over 35, have had excellent seasons so far, finding ways to evolve and be relevant.

"There are different ways to achieve the same goals," Kohli says. "Everyone has their own way of playing the game. Graeme Smith, for example - we felt like it's very difficult for him to hit the ball through the offside with a straight bat, but through the onside, he was unbeatable. And if you look at his record, he was a very successful Test player, very successful Test captain."

"It's not like an AB de Villiers kind of, you know, everything aligned and just perfection. Not like a Sachin Tendulkar where the bat's coming down absolutely in a straight line. But people have found ways to succeed who have not had those kind of abilities or that kind of way to play the game. It's lovely for people to watch. It's great for the game. At the same time, you have opportunity for, say, more classical players like myself, Bhuvi, KL.

What ties the Bhuvneshwars and the Rahuls together, he argues, is not age or experience in the abstract - it is a specific kind of foundation. And to explain it, Kohli reaches, instinctively, for Test cricket. The format he loved above all others, the one he retired from last year and invoked even amid his IPL joy.

"There are certain technicalities of the game that will never go out of fashion. You need technique. You need balance. You need some kind of symmetry to play this game. And because we've worked on those technical aspects for so long in our lives, from very young, because we aspired to play Test cricket and the technical foundation was the be-all and end-all for us - when you have technical abilities in place, you can always adjust.

"What is Bhuvi doing? He's not bowling banana in-swingers, banana out-swingers. He is bowling at a length that is telling the guys, 'I am good enough to hit this length every time. It is the most difficult length to hit. And I'm just going to keep hitting this length. Are you good enough to take me on or not? It's simple stuff. It's repetition. It's execution. It's uncomplicated consistency backed with tremendous belief. That's all he's doing. And look at the results. He's got six three-wicket hauls in 11 games. That's crazy. He's not even going at eight this season, you know.

"He's not playing all year round. He is not grinding through franchise tournaments on every continent. He is just someone who has spent a lifetime learning one thing very well, and then doing it. The belief he has in his abilities because of the work he's done from a childhood age of eight, nine years old to now - those foundations will always hold him in good stead."

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