Like most Indians, growing up in the 90s, I too found inspiration in Cricket. Yes, yes, religion and all like that. The sport was not merely the inspiration, it was individuals like Sachin, Sourav, Dravid, Laxman, Sehwag and Yuvraj who made us hope and believe that we could WIN from any dire situation across both formats - Tests or ODIs (T20s was a thing of the late 2000s). But if one thinks about it, these individuals and mind you individuals gave us hope. Yes, they too led teams but once they got dismissed (while batting) we rarely had any hope. I am stressing on the word 'hope' here. 'The ShawShank Redemption' and that iconic dialogue apart, hope has had a big part to play in us-fans from whenever we started watching this sport. This is true for any fanatic and their love for any sport, hope break our hearts but at times it gives us unmatched joy too!

So we continued hoping come 2011, until Sachin and Sehwag got dismissed in the finals of the World Cup with 240+ runs still needed to win the game. How many of you switched off your TV sets then?(I did not, by jove). I hoped and then Dhoni and Gambhir won us the 2nd World Cup. I am not stressing on their stellar performances here- that would require a separate post. But our belief that team sports is beyond individual heroics and that it is not always about 'the usual suspects', got strengthened. Yes the 'saints' and the 'underdogs' can make a team win. Playing as a team and winning as a team, that is what matters no? We hoped earlier now we started believing.

Or did we? 4-0 Test losses in England and Australia right after the World Cup was painful. Our belief still had a long way to go. While Dhoni was marshalling the ODI teams in the best possible manner, we had hardly won anything significant anywhere outside of India in Tests under his captaincy. This continued until the tour Down Under in 2014 when he quit mid-series. And we know who took over and how?

For those hardcore Test fans, it will be difficult to forget his first Test as captain at Adelaide- on one side the entire cricketing world was mourning the unfortunate death of Phil Hughes on the cricket field and on the other was a ravaging 26 year old , taking over the reigns from a near-God like sports icon of the country. He led like a true captain, he batted like a man with outrageous courage (100 in each innings) and YET we lost. So our hope still did not or could not transition to belief that day. But we realised one thing that day, India lost but they lost differently. We fought, albeit mostly by one man and yet we lost.

This man who took charge that fortunate day (fortunate for us and all cricket lovers) kept fighting to win and instilled that spirit of fighting in the teams that he picked, the teams that he mentored and the teams that he captained in the last 7 years. That team, under this man started to win everywhere-in Australia, in England, in SA , in NZ, if not series' but matches which otherwise was never thought or heard of, earlier. This man made sure that every bit of his sweat and blood went to make India win, anywhere, everywhere and from any situation, however impossible it might have seemed. This man, ladies and gentlemen, made us BELIEVE that India as a team could WIN, with or without him. And indeed they did (remember Sydney and Gabba 2020-21). This man, made a team, a TEAM, if not the greatest but one of the greatest Test Teams the cricketing world has ever seen.

This man, was and is Virat Kohli. And today after a stupendous 7 years of captaining and FORMING a team, in the purest and oldest format of cricket which is Tests , he has quit. For reasons which would at best stay with him. While he took utmost care in building a TEAM, the ones who probably needed to care for him DID NOT. Probably we as a nation did not deserve him, his captaincy, his ways. We did not deserve Kohli, the Captain. We did not deserve Kohli, the LEADER.

Thank you Kohli for making a fan like me BELIEVE! And like Walt Whitman said ' ...Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.' My Captain Kohli HAS fallen but IS NOT dead. May he continue to serve India Cricket for long and long!