India, Dec. 3 -- Some six weeks back, when he registered his second consecutive blob in Australia, we were among the many who wondered how long a rope Virat Kohli would get. Not how much he should get - are we crazy? - or how much he deserved, but how much he would be given by a decision-making group determined, if not desperate, to distance itself from the glorious past.

Those two games, in Perth and Adelaide in October, were the maestro's first international outings since his retirement from Test cricket in May, rendering him just a one-format player at the highest level, like Rohit Sharma. Before the first of those One-Day Internationals on October 19, Kohli's last competitive fixture was the final of IPL 2025, on June 3. He hadn't pl...