IPL 2023: What Virat Kohli’s spectacular six against SRH tells about his T20 batting

Some shots are single-ball events, to be devoured in isolation, its backdrop blurred to appreciate the sharper edges of the canvas. Virat Kohli’s short-arm jabbed (or on-driven? or both?) six off Sunrisers Hyderabad’s Nitish Kumar was one such single-ball event that thrills, marvels and fascinates the beholder, and with every rewatching it unravels more marvelous and mysterious layers, like a piece of transcendental art.
The short-arm jab has now become a frequent stroke of Kohli in this format. Nothing would be as cult-worshipped as the short-arm jabbed howitzer of Haris Rauf at MCG in the T20 World Cup that still floats in the mind. But he is embellishing the l. He has already essayed a few thunderous one this IPL — the most thunderous being the one off Mark Wood’s 148kph thunderbolt in early April. So when Nitish Kumar steamed in, all raw vigour and intensity of a debutant, he shaped up to execute one. When employing the shot, he picks and chooses his bowlers carefully. Not the full-ball flingers; not the short-ball merchants — he has other strokes to deal with them — but those that hit the borders of good and hard lengths, as Nitish does.
So his back-foot remains static, you could see the off and middle stumps, the front-foot goes front and across, both movements more gentle than pronounced. As the ball is about to land, he opens up his body slightly, the back-foot is dragged a trifle back and the bat comes down at an angle, at a semi-vertical, semi-horizontal shape. It’s his default angle when he short-arm jabs. All his energy is coiled into his shoulders and forearms, the body arching back to gather the power to propel the ball into a dant orbit. The back-leg collapses a touch, in the writhing energy of his upper body. The front-leg is upright, like the axis of a compass, and it makes half a stride forward and then back, to set the base for the shot. The down-swing of the bat is narrow, it can’t be expansive, as the short-arm jab, in essence, is a non-horizontal batted pull shot played when there is no room to free the arms.

KING KOHLI 👑
What a knock this has been! @imVkohli has wowed one and all with his masterful century in Hyderabad.
This is his 6th in #TATAIPL, the joint-most in the hory of the league with Chris Gayle.#SRHvRCB pic.twitter.com/G49dbi8bLJ
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) May 18, 2023
A freeze-frame of the sequence when he is just about to strike the ball reveals his impeccable alignment of his body. The upper body is about to pirouette, rather than swivel, the front-foot is facing a really straight mid-off and the back-foot, balanced on the toe, is staring at the bowler. The head and the ball is in a ruler-straight line. This alignment is the foundation of the batting genius that he is, the secret behind his still eyes.
Then suddenly, Kohli changes the shot, ever so subtly. Maybe because the ball did not bounce or angle in as much as he had anticipated; or a whim kicked in; a streak of inventiveness winked in. He straightened the bat a bit, not fully, and lofted-drove him, between deep midwicket and long-on. The wrs do not snap or whirl as much, and hence a golf-swing like follow-through, closer to the body than away from it, the bat recoiling behind his head.

A magnificent CENTURY Virat Kohli 🔥🔥
Take a bow, King Kohli!
His SIXTH century in the IPL.#TATAIPL #SRHvRCB pic.twitter.com/gd39A6tp5d
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) May 18, 2023
The crowd leapt instinctively from their seats. Faf du Plessis whispered an “ooh; a content grin spread over Kohli’s face. Watching him in such sublime touch should come with a health warning that you might need someone to pick your jaw off the floor or to fix your eyes back in their sockets when the match is over.
Then, Kohli has reeled out an even more jaw-dropping six of a similar hue some years ago, in an ODI against England in Pune in 2017. India were chasing 350 and Kohli had to sustain the tempo. He premeditated a bit backing away from the stumps. His initial plan was to target extra cover. But Chris Woakes followed him and shortened his length. Kohli got under the bounce and drove him in text-book style, the front-elbow skyward and all, over long-on.
As much as the majesty of the stroke, it illustrates how Kohli keeps evolving, how he is still a diligent student of the game and how he keeps himself relevant in the shortest format of the game in his own inimitable manner. Irresible could have been the temptation to overhaul the game and retool himself to meet the new-age demands of T20 cricket, to morph into a genius of improvisations, more so in the onslaught of criticisms that he bats too slow for the demands of the format. But quite early on in his career, he realised the importance of sticking to his game, though stretching its scope and range. The framework of batting remains strictly orthodox, it has little new-age frills, yet he continues to be a dominant force in the game. He has copped criticism for not scoring rapidly enough in the format, not hitting as many sixes as others, but he continues to define T20 games and seasons.

ICYMI!
A treat for the #RCB fans right here in Hyderabad.@imVkohli goes big with a maximum.#TATAIPL #SRHvRCB pic.twitter.com/KbojxpdFvG
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) May 18, 2023
In the post-match interview, he admitted as much. “I’ve never been a guy who tries so many fancy shots, because we have to play 12 months of the year, For me, it’s not [about] playing fancy shots and throwing my wicket away,” he said. “We’ve got Test cricket after the IPL, so I’ve got to stay true to my technique and find ways to win games for my team, something that I take a lot of pride in,” he added.
His genius is so outsized that he does not need to resort to T20 banalities. Little adjustments yield the desired results. It’s a trait of great batsmen, they keep evolving with subtle alterations and inventions in their game. A classic case is Sachin Tendulkar, who the end of his career rarely punched on the back-foot on the rise or pulled, but was more adept at harnessing the pace of the bowlers, an expert in paddle-sweeping and glide-drives to third man. Tendulkar was reacting to the spate of injuries that could have curtailed his career, whereas Kohli is responding to the escalated demands of the T20 format.

What is the secret of the highly successful Virat-Faf pair?🤔
We will let King Kohli spill the beans 😉#TATAIPL | #SRHvRCB | @RCBTweets | @imVkohli | @faf1307 pic.twitter.com/BEKGcALbZK
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) May 18, 2023
The cover drives in Test are converted to lofted extra-cover drives in T20s but with a longer extension of arms and tilting wrs upwards, or going inside-out, or just chipping the ball over cover (there was a gorgeous chipped four off Bhuvneshwar Kumar). He flips the wrs a bit more so that he could flick aerially.
To access the gaps on the off-side, he backs away at times; he sometimes hangs back and opens up his body so that he could muscle the ball down the ground. Like when he bludgeoned a low full toss on off-stump from Bhuvneshwar through long-on. To strike a contrast, a T20 faithful would have scooped the same ball over the keeper’s head. There is finesse and fearlessness in a scoop, but not the audacity and technical mastery required for a short-arm jab. Only as masterly a batsman as Kohli would have struck as audacious a stroke as the half short-arm jab, half on-drive Kohli stroked against Sunrisers Hyderabad. A genuine single-ball event—and one that captures the depth of his outsized talents.