The sight of the Sydney newspaper’s front page was enough to make one gasp aloud. Virat Kohli’s face, above folded arms, gazed back from The Daily Telegraph, the photograph taking up the entire top half of the page. A small image of Pat Cummins sat in the bottom left corner. The most arresting feature, however, was the gold headline in Hindi with an English translation underneath: Fight for the ages.
The rest of the page was split evenly between the two languages with a message from Australia’s Test captain while on the back page was an article on India’s opening batter, Yashasvi Jaiswal, in Punjabi and English.
That Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp publications across Australia ran articles so prominently in multiple languages before Friday’s first Test in Perth reflects the new magnitude of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy (BGT). Numerous discussions have questioned whether the BGT has eclipsed the Ashes as Test cricket’s greatest rivalry. Any conclusions are arbitrary and subjective, but India’s domination of the contest since their last series loss in 2014, including successive series wins in Australia in 2018-19 and 2020-21, has guaranteed colossal international interest.
Former Australia wicketkeeper-batter Adam Gilchrist believes the game’s fascination with the BGT has been fuelled by India’s decade of success.
“It’s a huge build-up and a fantastic rivalry,” Gilchrist said. “There are a few guys in this Australian group that have never beaten India in a series. So there’s limited success for this group against India in Tests as incentive.”
Kohli, naturally, dominates the coverage in the lead-up to the first Test at Perth Stadium, but the tone has changed. Diminished returns with the bat in recent years have raised the question of whether the end of his Test career is nigh. Former India Test cricketer Deep Dasgupta believes it may be crucial for Kohli, 36, to rediscover the mental edge that has inspired some of his greatest performances in Australia.
“Mentally, he was always up for a challenge,” Dasgupta said. If you look at Virat’s career over the years, you would say: ‘Oh, he’s so expressive,’ because, even if there is nothing, he would create something in his mind to get himself going.
“Last year hasn’t been that great for Virat. I don’t see that side. He seems a lot calmer. I wonder if that calmness has not helped his cricket. This is almost a twilight of his career, but I think Virat needs to find that anger which got him going, that space which might help him as a human being.”
Gilchrist has also noticed the change in India’s former captain and believes Australia should be wary of any attempts to get under Kohli’s skin.
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