Virat Kohli is at that stage of his career where he is thoroughly enjoying himself. It’s not as if he isn’t as driven as previously; it’s just that, having shouldered the burden of the Indian batting for so long, he feels he has earned the right to express himself with greater freedom than ever before, especially considering the wealth of batting riches at India’s disposal in white-ball iterations.

This freeing up of the mind in the last year and a half has manifested itself in a new, exciting, exhilarating, compelling Virat Kohli. Just when we thought we had seen it all when it came to Kohli, a senior international for 18 years now, he shook us out of our complacent slumber, uncorking an avatar that is even more attractive and authoritative. As if that were possible, you ask? It most certainly is.

This gentle yet significant tweak in mindset coincided, for want of a better term, with his retirement from Test cricket in May 2025. After a forgettable tour of Australia – an unbeaten century in the second innings of the first Test in Perth turned out to be a false dawn, as he repeatedly was snared into edging the ball behind the stumps for the rest of the series – he pulled the plug on his Test odyssey midway through IPL 2025. Only Kohli can tell us if the subsequent deliberate shift in approach had anything to do with his Test retirement; Kohli doesn’t talk to us these days, not having attended a press conference for more than three years, so we can only speculate on that count.