Kohli is right: Aggression on the cricket field is vital for India's success

When Australia were the best cricket team in the world between 1995 and 2010, they were also the most aggressive. When the West Indies were the best team in the world for the 15 years before that, they were also the most aggressive.

The connection is not accidental. To be the best is to be ruthless. No athlete or team rises to the top of their sport without the desire to crush those in their path. Former Australia captain Steve Waugh talked about the mental disintegration of his opponents. He didn’t want to just beat them on the field, he wanted to reduce them to quivering wrecks.

This is the attitude Virat Kohli wants to instill in the India team because Kohli wants to be the best. He doesn’t want to lose. He hates losing. He wants to win. And to win, you have to be aggressive.

The irony is we applaud, or at least respect, this attitude in teams such as Australia, but choose to castigate Kohli and his players for their in-your-face display in the Sri Lanka series. A prime example is Ishant Sharma’s coach, Shravan Kumar, who told Mid-Day pinned the blame for Ishant’s behaviour on Kohli and Ravi Shastri for talking about aggression too much.

The images of a fired-up Ishant beating his own head after a wicket actually brought back memories of a shirtless Sourav Ganguly on the balcony at Lord’s. Ganguly was criticised for that too but he and Kohli are cut from the same cloth. They are leaders who will do whatever they think is necessary in the moment to give their team an edge, however slight, because that could be the difference between winning and losing.

Kohli has never been shy about expressing himself no matter who he is playing against either. At the MCG in December, he took on the Australians and Mitchell Johnson in particular during a press conference after Johnson had taken a shy at the stumps but struck Kohli instead.

“I was really annoyed with him hitting me with the ball and I told him that’s not on — ‘try and hit the stumps next time, not my body’,” Kohli said. “You got to send the right message across, I am not there to take to some unnecessary words or chats from someone. There’s no good reason that I should respect unnecessarily some people when they are not respecting me.”

Sending the right message across is the key. Just being aggressive doesn’t make you a good team. Chatter does no good if the team can’t back it up with runs and wickets. But Kohli wants his team to aspire to be great and that requires a certain attitude. The good thing is he is just being himself. This isn’t an act he is putting on for public consumption.

It is also only fair that Kohli’s sporting gestures should be acknowledged. There was the respect the team showed Kumar Sangakkara in his last Test and the quiet pat on the back Kohli gave Angelo Mathews after his hundred in the third Test. Kohli is able to respect ability in his opponents too.

There is a line, of course. You don’t want to be gratuitously insulting or get physical with opposing players. Barging into players is a definite no-no. You also want to avoid being banned, as Ishant has been for one Test. But this also a young India team lead by a young captain and both are learning on the job. It will probably take Kohli a few series to figure out where the lines are and discover how far he and his team can go before the aggressiveness becomes self-destructive.

The ICC clearly felt the players had gone too far in this case – hence the fines and bans - but there’s no question the back-and-forth helped propel India to victory. As Kohli pointed out, the incident between Ishant and Dhammika Prasad happened at the right time because “an angry fast bowler is a captain’s delight.”

I’ll leave the last word to another now infamous hot head, S Sreeanth.

“Look at any pacer playing any form of cricket and you will see that he wants to be aggressive,” Sreesanth told DNA. Being aggressive is in the DNA of a fast bowler. Without aggression, a pacer cannot be at his best. What is aggression? It’s a quality that brings the best out of a pacer.

“I must say I was delighted to see Virat Kohli support Ishant Sharma. Virat is naturally aggressive. I like his style. Indian cricket and world cricket need captains like him.”