Ravi Shastri has labeled Virat Kohli the finest cricketer he has coached, commending both the breadth of Kohli’s batting records and the decisiveness he displayed in leadership throughout their tenure with the Indian national side.
Speaking on the Sky Sports YouTube channel, the former head coach insisted that Kohli’s distinguishing feature was his capacity to “dominate, be the face, play hard but play fair.” Shastri, who managed the team between 2017 and 2021, pointed to Kohli’s exceptional performances in Australia, South Africa, and England, characterising certain innings as “unreal.”
Kohli ascended to the Test captaincy in 2014, following MS Dhoni’s retirement, and Shastri asserts he grasped immediately that Kohli was to be the successor who would carry the side forward. “As soon as I assumed the role and once Dhoni had bowed out, he performed magnificently. Yet I perceived Virat as the leader who could propel it into the future,” Shastri recalled.
If you want to know Ravi Shastri’s biggest impact, it was giving the Test team its backbone. He built a squad defined by its steel and resilience, a group that simply wouldn’t break under pressure.
The results were immediate. They stormed back to the top of the ICC rankings, but the real prize was making history down under with two consecutive series wins in Australia.
This period will invariably be catalogued as the Kohli epoch. His combative leadership style drew potency from the extraordinary matrix of his own batting prowess, which reached peak valency between 2016 and 2019.
In that period, he scored a massive 4,208 runs, including 16 hundreds, at a mind-boggling average of nearly 67.
Shastri viewed the lack of ICC hardware as the sole unfulfilled promise. “That team had the maturity to carry a trophy across our borders. Still, our cricket remained consistently outstanding,” he noted. India advanced to the 2019 World Cup semi-final and occupied the inaugural World Test Championship final, yet those runs delivered only the taste of contention.
Under his watch, India was a juggernaut in T20s, winning 45 of 65 matches. Their ODI record was nearly as strong with 51 victories in 76 games, and in the grueling world of Test cricket, they secured 25 wins from 43 contests.
Kohli endures as the engine of India’s cricket and Shastri’s remarks reinforce the lasting relevance of their aligned philosophy.
