King Kohli And Hitman Sharma: The Legacy Of India’s Test Titans

For more than a decade and a half, their cricketing journeys ran parallelly, but unlike railway tracks that never meet, they also remained inextricably intertwined. Rohit Sharma was the first to break through, wearing a T20 World Cup winner’s medal nearly a year before Virat Kohli first represented India. But it was Kohli who shaded the subsequent exchanges until the Mumbaikar found a second wind in the wake of one of the more far-reaching decisions to impact Indian cricket.

Fire and Ice: The Parallel Journeys of Two Modern Greats

As personalities, India’s two immediate former captains who together have ridden into the Test sunset—isn’t there poetic justice in that, never mind that it leaves Indian cricket, indeed Test cricket, poorer for their absence?—couldn’t be any more different. Kohli, from West Delhi, is the perfect exemplar of the saying: ‘You can take the boy out of Delhi, but you can’t take Delhi out of the boy.’ Brash, aggressive, intense and unapologetic, he redefined his country’s approach to the longer format, ruthless to a fault in his desire to take his side to unprecedented heights away from home. Rohit, genteel and laidback and comfortable in his own skin, inherited a battle-hardened bunch from his predecessor and allowed them to carve their own path, secure in the knowledge that the skipper had their backs. Fire, and ice. Boisterous, and self-contained. Chalk, and cheese. But united by the desire to make their respective sides the best in the business.

Alongside Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who might have played his last competitive game—then again, 43 or not, you never know with No. 7, do you?—this duo built on the gains accrued by their illustrious seniors—the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, VVS Laxman, Virender Sehwag and Sourav Ganguly—exponentially, ensuring that any and all references to Indian cricket didn’t stop with the financial muscle of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Money can’t buy success, it can’t bolster skills; what it can do is provide the best possible ecosystem to ensure talent doesn’t slip through the cracks, that the mechanism to identify and nurture promise and potential is robust and vibrant.

Rohit and Kohli themselves are products of that vigorous process that was put in place long before the Indian Premier League (IPL) filled the coffers of the BCCI and led to a mushrooming of infrastructure beyond the traditional cricketing pockets. Dhoni was a driving force in that endeavour. Where personnel in the national side once came mainly from Mumbai and Delhi and Chennai and Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Dhoni fired a shot for the hinterland. From cricket-unfashionable Jharkhand which didn’t boast the most impressive pedigree, Dhoni’s spectacular climb up the ranks served as an inspiration. It helped that he fused rustic charm with unexpected sagacity; his flowing locks and his signature muscular strokes lent him an otherworldly hue even when he was playing alongside such established behemoths as Tendulkar and Dravid. By then, leading these men into battle, taking India to the T20 World Cup title (2007), the No. 1 Test ranking (2009), the 50-over World Cup crown (2011) and Champions Trophy glory (2013), Dhoni cemented his place in the pantheon as India’s most successful, if not greatest, cricket captain.

Kohli had a difficult act to follow. Unlike Dhoni, who was handpicked to lead the team by Dilip Vengsarkar’s selection panel in a left-field move, Kohli’s was a more structured route to the captaincy. His standing as a captain-in-waiting was solidified when he marshalled the Under-19 troops to World Cup success in Kuala Lumpur in early 2008; that same year, he broke into the One-Day International team, though he had to wait until January 2012 to showcase his Test chops. Who would have imagined, when he brought up his maiden Test hundred in Adelaide, that he would go on to become the greatest ambassador for the five-day game, its most vocal and passionate advocate who almost single-handedly compelled the white-ball-crazy Indian fan to invest in what the connoisseurs insist is the ultimate, most demanding cricketing format.

To hail Kohli as perhaps the most influential of all of India’s Test captains runs the risk of being attributed to recency bias, but there is no disputing his hand in an attitudinal shift in Indian cricket. Less than a half-decade into his international career, he figured out that if he aspired to be the best version of himself for a considerable length of time, he had to make lifestyle changes. He didn’t doubt his cricketing abilities; what he was also sure of was that if he didn’t get fitter, leaner and meaner, he wouldn’t be able to make smart decisions at the end of a long, hard day because in a tired body resides a limp, semi-functioning mind.

By making dietary adjustments, ramping up his fitness regimen and uncompromisingly working on his body, Kohli gave himself the best chance to be a success story. Once he succeeded Dhoni as the Test captain in January 2015, he was in a position to insist that his colleagues follow suit. With Ravi Shastri for company, first as team director till the middle of 2016 and then as head coach from August 2017, Kohli read the riot act—there would be no negotiation or compromise on fitness. Any drop in standards would result in the axe, no matter how skilful and consistent a performer one might be. Because he didn’t ask anything of his mates that he himself didn’t do, Kohli left them with no choice but to toe the line. One of the reasons India became a feared opponent in Australia and England, New Zealand and South Africa was because of the Kohli iron hand with regard to fitness.

The other big reason, of course, was the stringing together of an exceptional pace attack helmed by the extraordinary Jasprit Bumrah. For a year and a half after the genius with the unique action made his first international appearance, he was stereotyped as a white-ball specialist. Kohli and Shastri believed otherwise. They unleashed him on South Africa during a three-Test series in January 2018, and Indian cricket hasn’t been the same again. With Bumrah as the battering ram alongside the experienced Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami, India invested heavily in the speed merchants—Mohammed Siraj, Navdeep Saini, T Natarajan and Shardul Thakur, among others. It was no accident that India won their first Test series in Australia (2-1) in 2018-19, or that they backed it up with a similar scoreline on their next visit Down Under in 2020-21.

Kohli didn’t repeat a playing XI for his first 27 Tests as captain, determined to play horses for courses at the risk of ruffling feathers. Who’s to argue with his methods, given that India won 40 and lost only 17 of the 68 matches in which he was in charge? Captaincy also impacted his batting positively; he made a century in each innings in his first Test as skipper (if only in a stand-in capacity) and for five years from the end of 2014, he was by a distance the best batter in the world, bar none.

Building the System, Shaping the Future

Where there was a touch of the inevitable to Kohli becoming the all-format captain, it won’t be out of place to term Rohit an ‘accidental’ skipper. The early promise in the form of centuries in his first two Tests on his belated debut in November 2013 quickly devolved into a string of underwhelming efforts in the five-day variant even as his stocks as a destructive limited-overs batter soared once he was thrust into the role of an opener in January 2013 by Dhoni. With three ODI double-hundreds, five T20I tons and 37 white-ball international centuries, Rohit is among the all-time greats but his Test career seemed determined to remain one less fulfilled until, in a less acknowledged masterstroke, Kohli and Shastri reprised the Dhoni formula by asking him to open in Tests too in October 2019.

A few months previously, at the 50-over World Cup in England, Rohit had slammed an unprecedented five hundreds, which played its part in firming up the Kohli-Shastri resolve. Rohit responded with centuries in both innings in his first Test as opener, revealed his hunger to succeed in England by shedding his natural aggression and scoring his maiden overseas ton at The Oval in 2021, and had established himself in the Test side when Kohli gave up the captaincy in early 2022. By then, Rohit had already led the Mumbai Indians to five IPL crowns and was therefore the obvious new all-format captain, a role he slipped into effortlessly and with rare empathy.

Like Dhoni, Rohit muscled India to the T20 World Cup (2024) and Champions Trophy (2025) crowns, though in his final run as Test captain, he tailspun inexorably and India suffered crushing series losses at home to New Zealand last November and in Australia earlier this year. Clearly, as Test batter, if nothing else, Kohli is a few notches above his successor but as captains and leaders, both have laid down the marker that Shubman Gill will be hard-pressed to emulate.

Indian Test cricket, particularly, is in the exciting throes of transition. That, despite the sudden retirements within a week of Rohit and Kohli, they are still able to put out a formidable outfit is a testament to the depth that the well-crafted system has provided. In their own different ways, Kohli and Rohit have contributed to the process; their legacy will extend well beyond numbers and statistics though especially in Kohli’s case, those too are breathtaking.

R Kaushik is a Bengaluru-based journalist and author who has been writing on cricket for 34 years

This article appears in Outlook Magazine’s June 21, 2025 issue, Innings/Outings, which captures a turning point in Indian cricket —from retiring legends to small-town stars reshaping the game’s power map. It appeared in print as 'The King And The Hitman.'