He put one to his leg. Single. One run. And Virat Kohli punched the air as if he had just won the World Cup.
The crowd at the Shaheed Veer Narayan Singh International Stadium in Raipur erupted. People laughed. Not at him, but with him. Because they understood. Because for once the mask has slipped just enough to remind everyone that beneath the swagger, the centuries and the ice chase is a man. A very human man.
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“I was nervous,” he admitted afterward. “I just wanted to get off the mark and just celebrate and have some fun out there.
Virat Kohli. Nervous. About getting off the mark.
That line deserves to sit for a while because it’s both extraordinary and utterly ordinary.
He entered under the weight of back-to-back ducks, against LSG, against MI, in what was his bleakest stretch of the IPL 2026 season. There were whispers. Was form declining at a critical moment? Were the ducks a sign of something more?
At the crease, commentator Ian Bishop was building it up ball by ball: “Can he run, can he run?”
Then debutant Saurabh Dubey, the same paceman who had made the ball move both ways and had already unsettled Jacob Bethell, bent and Kohli calmly tucked it into the leg side and ran through. One run. One fist pump. One huge roar.
The moment went viral within minutes. But what came after told the real story.
He scored 105.
Unbeaten. Outside 60 balls. His ninth IPL century. In the chase. On a pitch that was not easy to bat on. Against a KKR attack that had just won four games on the trot.
HIS COMPANIONS PROPHECY WORDS
Two days before the match, Kohli’s RCB teammate Krunal Pandya said something that raised a few eyebrows at the time.
After his match-winning knock against Mumbai Indians, Pandya offered this about Kohli: “Firstly, sir, Virat Kohli is a master player. If he doesn’t score in two matches, I’m actually more excited because you know Virat Kohli will come back strongly. He’s got a huge hunger in him. He’s a different animal, isn’t he?”
It sounded like the talk of a loyal teammate. In hindsight, it was a prophecy.
Because the thing about Kohli: the ducks didn’t break him. They refueled him.
“Pressure is a privilege,” Kohli said after the match.
“It actually keeps you humble, it keeps you focused, it makes you work hard again in practice. After a few games that don’t go your way, you start to feel a little nervous again. It helps you go out and work on your game and come back even more. . . . And at the end of the day, when you look back, those setbacks are so important because they put you back in the first place that got you in the first place.”
And then there was this: not scoring would eat him up. It bothers him. For a man who walks to the crease like he owns it, who has made the impossible look routine for two decades, these are surprisingly raw words. But that’s the point. The calm you see in the crease is not an absence of feeling. It’s a feeling, compressed and redirected, channeled into the footwork, the shot selection, that fist pump for a single that somehow said more than any celebration of the century could.
WAS HE OUT OF FORM?
What was remarkable about the innings itself was how little it looked like a man in search of form. He didn’t come out swinging to prove a point. He played his pace. He found his gaps. He made the chase look like clockwork.
In the power play, he systematically dismantled Vaibhav Arora and picked out gaps with surgical precision. RCB lost Jacob Bethell early, but Kohli and Devdutt Padikkal put together a composed 92-run stand that broke the back of the KKR bowling.
With Padikkal down for 39, skipper Rajat Patidar walked in – only to be rocked by bouncer Kartik Tyagi, who crashed into his helmet. Patidar understandably slowed down and looked for a rhythm. Kohli read it immediately and took the brunt of it, accelerating through the middle overs with no fuss, no flourish, as if he’d just decided he had to finish this one.
Then came the crux of the match, a moment that only a player with his experience could pull off. In the 14th over, facing the left-arm spinner Anukul Roy, Kohli was beaten a bit with flight but remained absolutely still, waited and fired the ball over the bowler’s head for a six. He barely watched it. The ball nevertheless sailed into the stands. That’s not a technique. That is accumulated wisdom, distilled into a single unhurried moment.
On the very next over, he showed the other side – pure wrist, pure power – whipping a fuller delivery from Tyagi into the mid-wicket stands. Wickets fell around him, but Kohli stayed till the end. Eleven boundaries, three sixes. The remaining 43 runs came the old-fashioned way: running hard between the wickets. At 36. In the heat of Raipur.
Padikkal, who had the best view for most of the innings, simply said after the match: “I had the best seat in the house tonight. Some of the knocks he played were just remarkable. Coming into this game after two ducks is never easy. And he showed why he is who he is. To not have this game on your mind and to go out there and bat the way he does is unbelievable.”
Kohli is now 36. He has retired from Test cricket and T20Is. He lives in London, stepping back from the grind to spend time with his family. When he turns up for the IPL or India ODIs, it’s a deliberate, deliberate choice – and when he does, he takes everything with him.
Before Wednesday, there were real questions about whether he would reach 600-plus runs in a fourth consecutive IPL season – a streak that speaks of a consistency almost unmatched in the tournament’s history. With 105 in Raipur and matches to come, he is firmly back in the race for the Orange Cap and the streak lives on.
Virat Kohli is going through doubts. He feels the pressure. He is nervous about one run. And then he scores a hundred and breaks the record of the fastest player to 14,000 T20 runs.
Human and superhuman. Sometimes in the same over.
This is Virat Kohli. That has always been Virat Kohli.
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– The end
Published on:
14 May 2026 08:36 IST
