On September 8, Virat Kohli scored a century against Afghanistan, 1,021 days after his previous hundred. The long dry spell was often used as an example by his critics of a slump in his batting form, though his captain Rohit Sharma and coach Rahul Dravid pooh-poohed these claims.
“With Virat, people get a little bit obsessed with his statistics and his numbers. For us, it’s not really about that,” Dravid had said just days before Kohli’s recent century. In February, Sharma had defended Kohli saying his form was not a matter of concern for the team management. “It’s a different matter that he did get a hundred, but in the series against South Africa, he scored two half-centuries. I don’t think there is anything wrong,” he said.
No one knows better about prolonged spells of ‘century droughts’ than Sharma himself. After scoring two consecutive hundreds in 2010 — the first two centuries in his career — Sharma did not score another century for 1,235 days, which is over 200 days more than Kohli’s latest dry spell. Sharma also had another slump. His 14th century came over 500 days after his 13th century. However, he now holds 41 hundreds across formats.
