Indian batting great Sunil Gavaskar believes there is a big technical glitch that is affecting Virat Kohli at the moment during the ongoing Test series against England.  Like skipper Joe Root did for England, the onus was on his Indian counterpart to score a big inning and bring his team back into the game in the second Test at Lord’s, but he could not do so. 

On the penultimate day of the second Test of the five-match series at the Lord’s Cricket ground, Kohli made a promising start (20 off 31) before poking at a wide Sam Curran delivery to leave his team in dire straits at the stroke of lunch. In the first innings of the Test, Kohli appeared very circumspect, scoring 42 off 103 balls, but in the second, Kohli was a lot more positive in his approach, getting to 20 off 31 balls, but Gavaskar reckons the India captain could have played himself in a little more, as that is what a Test match is all about.

The Indian skipper also got into a heated argument with England’s bowling spearhead Jimmy Anderson during his brief stay at the crease. “That method has been successful for him. He has got 8,000 Test runs with that back and across the movement. But he is playing at deliveries way outside off stump and a little too early in the innings.

This time around, the foot is somewhere else, the bat is somewhere else, which means that he hasn’t really played well,” Gavaskar said on air during his commentary stint with the Sony Sports network. “It could be about this much-talked-about word intent but in a five-day game, every batsman goes in to score runs. It’s the method that differs,” he added.

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Indian skipper struggling with form.

Since the 2018 Oval Test against England, Kohli is sitting eighth among the most Indian batsmen, which itself sums up the sorry state of affairs. The struggle to avoid repetition of mistakes by Kohli has been very frustrating at times. On this tour, it looks as though Kohli has invoked an old ghost as he often perished outside the off-stump. James Anderson (Nottingham) and Ollie Robinson (Lord’s) snared him bowling the fourth stump line.

“That method has been successful for him. He has got 8000 Test runs with that back and across the movement. But he is playing at deliveries way outside off stump and a little too early in the innings. This time around, the foot is somewhere else, the bat is somewhere else, which means that he hasn’t really played well. It could be about this much-talked-about word intent but in a five-day game, every batsman goes in to score runs. It’s the method that differs,” Gavaskar said on the Sony Sports Network.

Gavaskar dwelled further on Kohli’s technical faults: “When you talk about this, trying to take this attack to the opposite approach, and if that’s what intent is, it can get you into trouble as we saw. I think every batsman should be left alone to find his own method. This is a Test match.” Gavaskar, the first batsman in Test history to reach 10,000 runs, added that the technique required to succeed for the longer version of the game is much different compared to the shorter-ball formats.

“When you talk about this ‘trying to take this attack to the opposition’ approach, and if that is what intent is, it can get you into trouble as we saw. I think every batsman should be left alone to find his own method. This is a Test match. In ODI and T20I, it’s a completely different situation, but over here, what they need to look into is get themselves in and try to play in the old-fashioned V. Play only when you have fought through,” Gavaskar added.