What Virat Kohli Taught Me About Showing Up

I didn’t fall in love with cricket because of Virat Kohli. I fell in love with it because of Sachin, Ganguly and Dravid.

As a kid, those three were my window into the game. Sachin gave me the magic, the feeling that anything was possible with a bat in hand. Dravid gave me patience and the quiet beauty of doing the hard things well. And Ganguly — Ganguly gave me attitude. I was a proper Ganguly fanboy. The shirt twirl at Lord’s, the way he looked the opposition in the eye and refused to blink — that told a young me that an Indian team didn’t have to play to survive. It could play to win.

So when Virat Kohli came along, I was already wired to notice a certain kind of player. The fighter. The one who carries the team on his back and dares the world to stop him.

From a teenager lifting a trophy to a man who changed everything

I started following Virat from the 2008 U-19 World Cup, when he captained India to the title. Even then you could see it — the chest-out confidence, the refusal to back down. From there I followed him into RCB, and then into the senior Indian team, and somewhere along that journey he stopped being just a player I watched and became a player I learned from.

Because here’s the thing about Virat: his talent is obvious, but his talent isn’t the lesson. Plenty of people are talented. What separates him is everything that surrounds the talent.

The things he actually taught me

Self-discipline. Virat didn’t arrive as the fittest man in world cricket. He built that. He famously rebuilt his body and his habits because he decided that being good wasn’t enough when he could be relentless. Watching that taught me something simple but heavy: you are not stuck with the version of yourself you start with. Discipline is a choice you make again every single day.

Trust the process. Long before “process over outcome” became a hashtag, Virat lived it. The training, the routine, the preparation that no one claps for — he did it whether the runs came or not. That’s the part I’ve tried to carry into my own life. Show up for the work, not just the reward.

Game awareness. The way he reads a chase, paces an innings, knows exactly when to absorb pressure and when to release it — that’s not luck, it’s attention. It taught me that intensity without awareness is just noise. The best players are also the best readers of a situation.

Positive aggression. This is the Ganguly thread, picked up and turned up to full volume. Virat brought a fire onto the field that lifted everyone around him — but it came from wanting to win, not from wanting to put someone down. There’s a difference between aggression that builds and aggression that just burns. He showed me which one to choose.

Respect for the sport. For all the fire, Virat never stopped loving and protecting the game itself — especially Test cricket, the format he championed when many were walking away from it. That respect is its own kind of greatness.

Loyalty you almost never see

If you want the purest example of who Virat is, look at RCB.

Eighteen years. One franchise. Heartbreak after heartbreak — finals lost, seasons that fell apart, a fanbase that loved him through all of it. He could have chased a trophy elsewhere. He never did. “This is the team I’m going to play for till the last day I play the IPL,” he said, and he meant it.

And then, in 2025, it finally happened. RCB won their first-ever IPL title, and Virat — at 36, after everything — sat beside that trophy in tears. “I’ve given this franchise my youth, my prime, and all my experience,” he said. “I never thought this day would come.”

That moment is the whole point. Loyalty doesn’t always get rewarded on schedule. Sometimes you give your soul to something for eighteen years before it gives back. But the people who stay, who keep turning up after every disappointment — those are the people who eventually hold the cup. He waited longer than anyone should have to. He still stayed. That’s the lesson.

Still hungry, even at the top

What amazes me most is that the hunger never dimmed. Here’s a man who has achieved nearly everything the game can offer — and still, every innings, he played like he had something to prove. That tells you how much he cared. Not “I’ve made it,” but “how do I give the best, today, again.” Staying hungry after you’ve already arrived might be the hardest discipline of all, and he made it look like the most natural thing in the world.

Two shots I’ll never forget

Ask me for my favourite Virat moments and I don’t reach for statistics. I reach for two shots.

The first is the cover drive in red-ball cricket. There is no more beautiful sight in the game — the front foot leaning in, the full face of the bat, the ball racing away like it was always meant to. For me that drive is Virat at his most complete: control, elegance and aggression in one motion.

The second is white-ball Virat at his most fearless — that six straight back over the bowler’s head against Pakistan at the MCG in the 2022 T20 World Cup. India were dead and buried. He took on Haris Rauf and hit a shot that didn’t just clear the rope, it cleared all reason. In a moment that demanded survival, he chose audacity. That’s the whole man in one swing.

A chapter closes, a level is set

In May 2025, Virat retired from Test cricket. He walked away as India’s fourth-highest run-scorer in the format, with 9,230 runs and 30 centuries, and as India’s most successful Test captain ever. But numbers undersell it. He took Indian Test cricket and raised its standard — its fitness, its fielding, its belief that India could win anywhere in the world, especially overseas where we used to fold.

He set a bar. And now my hope is simple: that the current generation, and the ones coming after, don’t just look up at that bar — they climb past it. The greatest tribute to a player like Virat isn’t to call him untouchable. It’s to be inspired enough to go further.

What I’m left with

I grew up because of Sachin, Ganguly and Dravid. But I became a more disciplined, more determined version of myself partly because of Virat Kohli.

He taught me that talent is the starting line, not the finish. That you build your own ceiling. That loyalty is worth the wait. That you can be on fire and still respect the people and the game around you. And that no matter how high you climb, you show up tomorrow hungry.

That, more than any record, is his real legacy. And it’s the part I get to keep.