There is a moment, rare and fleeting, when nothing else gets to you. Not the crowd, not the noise, not decades of geopolitics pushing from the border. Thirty thousand people might be screaming, the game was teetering on the edge of history, but the surrounding world just blurs into irrelevance. Time slows down. The ball leaves the hand feeling bigger, brighter, more obedient than it should. The field turns into a square, but you only see straight lines.
Decisions cease to be decisions. They become instinct.
Batters call it being in the zone, but that phrase lacks its deep isolation. It is a silent separation from everything that is not skin and seam.
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Four years ago, Virat Kohli found that silence on a cold night at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. On Sunday, Ishan Kishan found it in Colombo, on a surface that defied all certainties but his own, against a Pakistan that looked like they had a plan until they showed they didn’t.
If Kohli’s MCG special was a Shakespearean tragedy turned triumph, Kishan’s 77 was John Wick. Fast, clinical and unapologetically violent. Both belonged to that transcendental space where the outside world ceases to matter. But while one felt like salvation, the other felt like execution.
IN THE ZONE
On the surface of Colombo, who caught and turned, Kishan produced an innings that refused to acknowledge his difficulty.
Pakistan loaded their XI with rotation. Off-spinner, leg-spinner, left-arm spinner and even the enigmatic drill, Suryakumar Yadav admitted he was “off the charts” on the eve of the match. But none of that mattered to Kishan. He made 77 off 40 deliveries, 193, on a pitch where everyone else seemed bound by his conditions.
Even India’s best spin players, Tilak Varma and Suryakumar Yadav, moved almost like run-a-ball, respecting his resistance. Kishan moved at almost double the speed as if only he could solve his resistance.
Abhishek Sharma’s dismissal in the first over should have set the tone. Salman Ali Agha, Pakistan’s captain and off-spinner, immediately showed that the pitch is the bowlers’ ally. Tensions between the Indian fans came to a head after Abhishek’s duck, but Ishan kept his cool. (AP photo)
At that stage, something shifted.
“When the match started and Salman Agha got the wicket of Abhishek Sharma in the first over, I thought it could be something else,” Sunil Gavaskar told IndiaToday.in.
India was 1 for 1. Shaken.
You felt it too, didn’t you? That brief flicker of doubt. That quiet, restless “umm” forming before the mind could articulate it.
Another ending. Shaheen Afridi, new ball in hand, Colombo heavy with expectations. Pakistan felt vulnerable. The pitch seemed poised to make it happen.
Kishan doesn’t.
The first ball Afridi faced disappeared into the stands over midwicket. A bouncer who met not with caution, but with certainty.
The sound of clean contact wasn’t just intentional. It was a statement. Kishan had already decided the terms of his innings.
From that moment on, the match revolved around him.
WAITING WINS
He lifted the spinner upside down over the infield. When Abrar Ahmed, Pakistan’s premier spinner, was introduced to the power bowl, Kishan swept him into the stands. Not a slap, but a calculated strike, balanced and precise. Later, when the field widened, he adapted just as easily, the threading of the late cut, once the freedom was enhanced, was gone.
He waited. That was the difference.
He seemed to have more time than anyone else. He looked longer, committed later, put his hands deeper into the path of the ball. Ishan Kishan’s stunning form has created havoc in Pakistan. (PTI photo)
Gavaskar noticed this.
“Because he has played very good cricket strokes. He waits for the ball even when he is playing the cross bat. It is not a wild toil. Playing across the line always has its risks. But if you wait for the ball like him, you can achieve success,” Gavaskar said.
Waiting is defiance on such a surface. Turning pitch rush batter. They force decisions early, introducing doubt between thought and execution. Kishan cleared this doubt. He didn’t play upside down with power, but precisely. He swung away, pulling not to control the ball but to meet it at its moment of vulnerability.
By the time he reached his fifty, off just 27 balls, the fastest in an India-Pakistan World Cup match, the match had already moved into his orbit. India scored in ten overs while he was at the crease. After he fell, that rate dropped to seven. He scored 77 of India’s first 88 runs.
This is what the zone looks like. Not dominance in the conventional sense, but separation. The game becomes private. The crowd retreats. The stakes are blurring.
ANTIKOHLI KLEP
In Melbourne, Kohli entered this space through survival. India were 31 for 4. The MCG was huge and coming. The Pakistani bowlers were not only attacking the stumps but also the Indian security. Kohli endured it all. His unbeaten 82 was resistance in motion, each surviving until survival became belief and belief became victory.
Kishan did not survive Colombo. He overdid it.
This was a knock against Kohli. Not smaller, but the opposite. Kohli absorbed the pressure until he broke. Kishan applied the pressure until nothing else could hold.
And yet both shifts were born out of the same isolation.
Kishan wasn’t supposed to be here. Late entrants to the team, an afterthought in the first interviews, arrived without warranty. Returns are usually gradual, negotiated through fragments of rhythm and reassurance.
Kishan skipped this negotiation.
“What a comeback he made,” Gavaskar said. “What a return to international cricket he has made. What a return to the Indian team.”
Pakistan turned and trusted the hostility of the pitch. He clutched the ball, spat, misbehaved. Others adapted.
Kishan doesn’t.
He advanced, swept, steered and dragged with the confidence of someone who had settled his doubts elsewhere, in a quieter environment, away from this noise, for the past two years. Ishan’s bat left the Pakistani bowlers at a loss. (PTI photo)
When he fell in the ninth over, India’s scoring slowed and the pitch started to matter again. But the decisive work has already been completed. Kishan forced the match into terms that Pakistan could not reverse.
Melbourne will be remembered for the spectacle, the innings that saved the game that got away. Colombo belongs to a different tradition. It was control from the start.
Kohli wrested the victory from uncertainty. Kishan never allowed uncertainty to exist.
For a brief moment, they both entered that rare space where the pressure dissolves and the game belongs solely to one mind.
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– The end
Issued by:
Debodinna Chakraborty
Published on:
February 16, 2026