Virat Kohli’s “18 till I fly” dream takes off as RCB universe conspires to try giving their talisman the elusive IPL trophy

He wasn’t done yet. “I have needed constant reminders even from youngsters. I have been under pressure, I have been insecure, tried to protect my performances, tried to protect my reputation, ‘oh I am Virat Kohli I need to perform every game, can’t get out’ and then the youngsters come and tell me why I didn’t hit that ball.. I was like yeah they are right.

“I was caught up with ‘me me me’, and what I should do, how people are looking at me and who I am, and in all that stuff that I forgot how to play the game. That’s all we need to remember how not to complicate this.”

Some of those frank words wouldn’t have surprised those who had closely seen him play in the IPL over the years. Especially that ‘can’t get out’ mode that he would occasionally get stuck in. In the last couple of years, he has tried his best to shrug that off, extend himself in the powerplay, play the big shots if required without fussing too much about the what-if scenario of getting dismissed.

He might have told AB de Villiers not to say the old RCB slogan ‘ee-saala cup namde’ (This year, the cup will be ours) according to the South African, but he hasn’t been shy of fronting up to the potential triumph. Sometime early in the tournament, as a promotional piece for the tournament for the official broadcasters, he was in an advert where he referenced the 18th year of tournament and how it ties up with his jersey no 18. The advert, that threw up other assorted connections to the number 18, ended with him knocking the wooden table – ‘touch wood’, the universal gesture for preventing bad luck.

Perhaps, due to the long 18-year wait, his age, and fear that his retirements from international T20 and Test cricket, in particular, threw up, there seems to be sympathy in the air – for him, from a large section of fans. The RCB captain Rajat Patidar has also pitched the final almost as a throwback to how the Indian team and the cricketing nation as a whole saw the 2011 world cup as a tribute to Sachin Tendulkar. “We will try and win this for him,” Patidar said on eve of the final. “He has done so well for India and RCB over the years.”

This year Kohli has been pretty smart with the way he has handled his emotions. The post-wickets screaming reactions have unsurprisingly been intact, of course, but the way he has dealt with certain scenarios during batting have been interesting. When the aggressive-needlers like Digvesh Rathi have bowled at him, he has stubbed out potentially tense scenes with a smile. Rathi had once pulled away before releasing the ball, but Kohli just hunched on his bat and smiled. Just as he had done in the Champions Trophy when the Pakistani spinner Abrar Ahmed, who had given a send-off to Shubman Gill, stopped a ball on follow-through and fired it just over Kohli’s head.

But on other occasions, when he might have stayed quiet, he has fired away. Like he did with Shreyas Iyer. During the game in Bangalore this season, Iyer was presumably being heckled by the crowd behind him when he was fielding near the boundary. And when he won the game, Iyer turned around, cupped his palm around the ear, as if to say ‘can’t hear any noise now that you lost’. In the next encounter between the two teams, Kohli remained unbeaten to seal a win, turned to Iyer and pumped his fists furiously. Kohli also was seen explaining that celebration to Shreyas, who didn’t seem too thrilled. In another game, in Delhi incidentally, he told KL Rahul, who had previously done the circle-the-turf celebration to suggest the Bangalore ground belongs to him, that he had planned to do it had he remained unbeaten till the end.

It remains to be seen how well he bats in the IPL final on Tuesday. There has been a lull in his performances in the big ICC tournaments for a while, but he corrected it with a stunning 76 in the T20 world cup final last June in Barbados.

But in the Champions Trophy final this March, he was dismissed for just 1. His three IPL finals too have been a bit of a mixed bag. In 2009 in the chase against Deccan Chargers who were dismissed for just 143, Kohli fell for just 7 as RCB went from 99 for 4 to 129 all out. In the 2011 final against CSK, he hit a 35-ball 32 as the chase went nowhere and in the 2016 final, that he has talked about as his big heartbreak, he was dismissed for a 35-ball 54, triggering a stunning collapse.

He gets one more chance to course-correct that on Tuesday. In that chat with the RCB women players, he had talked about how empty he had felt when his captaincy came to end in the IPL after the 2021 season. “The time that my captaincy tenure was ending here, I was left with no belief. I was gone. The tank was absolutely empty. That was my own perspective saying I can’t handle it anymore but next season, new people came with new ideas. They were excited, individually I wasn’t but we reached three playoffs in a row.. and now I have that excitement.”

And now, under Rajat Patidar’s captaincy and the celebrated Andy Flower’s coaching, Kohli gets his date with destiny. This season, the likes of Jitesh Sharma, Phil Salt and Romario Shepherd have nailed their walk-on parts, and crucially taken the risks so Kohli can script the lead role on the page, at a pace and tenor amiable to him.

Will the 18-year wait end for him or will it be the talismanic Shreyas Iyer who ends Punjab Kings’s own 18-year wait for the trophy?