India, Dec. 7 -- For a decade, Virat Kohli's ODI genius was defined by soak-then-surge - cruise in the second gear, stack up one and twos, and only turbo once the game was under his thumb. Against South Africa, that template got ripped up. What we saw across the three ODIs felt like Virat Kohli 2.0: same control, same chase-mastery, but with T20-style intent wired in from ball one.

Across Ranchi, Raipur, and Visakhapatnam, Kohli scored 302 runs from 258 balls at a strike rate of 117.05, with two hundreds and an unbeaten 65* in the chase in Vizag. That's about 24 runs per 100 balls, higher than what he has scored throughout his ODI career (93.65) and well above what he was scoring in the last year (84.05). This is not just back to his bes...