Since the infamous Adelaide Test of 2020, India have played 31 Tests out of which their talisman Virat Kohli has not featured in five of them \u2013 three in that epic 2020 series itself with Kohli flying back home for the birth of his first child after the first Test. The next he missed was the series opener against New Zealand in Kanpur in 2021 with India fielding a depleted side for the 1st Test, while the most recent one was the Johannesburg Test in 2022, owing to a back spasm. Now, Kohli has withdrawn from the first two Tests of the upcoming India vs England series 2024 citing personal reasons. Ever since India\u2019s loss to Australia in the World Test Championship last year, India have been steadily moving towards a transition in the Test format. Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane have been the biggest casualties of this new thought process while there have been as many as four debutants for India since the WTC final \u2013 Ishan Kishan, Yashaswi Jaiswal, Mukesh Kumar and Prasidh Krishna. KS Bharat and Suryakumar Yadav also made their debuts in 2023 in the India vs Australia series before the WTC final.<\/p>\n
Do You Go Back to Pujara, Rahane?<\/strong><\/p>\n The transition will eventually come knocking at Kohli\u2019s doors and in the same vein, Rohit Sharma as well. And like Rahane and Pujara, Kohli\u2019s Test numbers have dwindled in this time frame, while Rohit\u2019s has picked up. Since the Adelaide Test, Kohli has played 26 matches scoring 1530 runs at 35.58 with two hundreds to his name. These numbers are a far cry from his career average of 49.15, and in this time frame, five other players have played more than 10 Test matches whose numbers are better than Kohli \u2013 Rishabh Pant (47.00), Rohit (44.33), Shreyas Iyer (39.27), Ravindra Jadeja (37.40), Axar Patel (36.64). Rahane and Pujara in this period were 30.51 and 26.00 in 25 and 19 matches, respectively. Gill has not been any better either with 30.58 in 20 matches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the infamous Adelaide Test of 2020, India have played 31 Tests out of which their talisman Virat Kohli has not featured in five of them \u2013 three in that epic 2020 series itself with Kohli flying back home for the birth of his first child after the first Test. The next he missed was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,62,7],"tags":[287,301,300,299],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia","category-india","category-sports","tag-cricket","tag-india-vs-englend","tag-test-match","tag-viraaaat-kohli"],"yoast_head":"\n