Virat Kohli murders bowling without any obvious bloodshed

It is hard to find superlatives to put Virat Kohli into perspective In an era where powerhitting is now almost de rigueur his T20 batting defies description defies anything the bowlers can do to stop himRoyal Challengers Bangalore skipper Virat Kohli en route his 113 vs KXIP at M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on Wednesday PicPTIWhat sets him apart from Chris Gayle Rohit Sharma AB de Villiers Kieron Pollard David Warner the list goes on is that Kohli murders the bowling without any obvious bloodshed There is no brutality no savage mauling It is a more beautiful thing than anything Gayle selfproclaimed universe boss can bring tothe partyWhat the rest do with their feet Kohli does with his wrists De Villiers has dancing feet an unbelievable eye and amazing trick shots Yuvraj Singh has a graceful arc that is sometimes vulnerable to the short ball or the yorker Warner uses a railway sleeper to bludgeon MS Dhoni has a short backlift and incredible power in the forearms Kohli scores as fast as anyone often faster with the most classical cricket strokes in the context of T20 cricket Those incredible wrists open up 360 degrees without having to move around the crease to create impossible angles in the style of Glenn Maxwell or De VilliersOver cover the sliced yorker that sizzles to backward point the tracer bullet that leaves midwicket helpless the straight arrow that leaves a comet trail past the umpire the leg glance that has short fineleg floundering in its wake mdash Kohli accesses these areas without extravagant changes to his footwork Hardest to bowl to For a bowler this must surely be the hardest player to bowl to because he offers few clues as his intentions and the angle of his wrists can direct the ball to almost every part of the groundHow do you defend against thatOne idea might be to land the ball on the green stuff more often You know the stuff that cows eat Grass Has there ever been an IPL where fewer deliveries make contact with the surface so lovingly tendered by the curator Every team has its own specialist bowling coach but they may as well recruit a pitching coach from baseball if their modus operandi is to keep serving up balls that dont bounce before they get dispatched for a home runLets assume for one moment that professional cricketers bowlers are capable of executing a closed skill Bowling is essentially a closed skill in the sense that you should be able to make the ball land roughly where you intended it perhaps a few centimetres grace allowed The pace may vary the ball might swing or not through the air it may nip off the seam but when you bring it back to basics it is probably the only aspect of the game that encompasses a relatively closed skill setApart from prevailing winds or dew bowling is a closed skill The batsman and fielders then have to react to where the ball lands and every other aspect of the game then becomes an open skill The key assumption of course is that the ball will actually land on the pitch thereby presumably create more variables that the batsman has to contend withFor all Kohlis brilliance and brilliant he is without question when modern batsmen keep being dished up kneehigh full tosses you have to question why teams waste money on bowling coaches If that is the end result of their skilltransfer protocols then save your money It cannot possibly be the case that the game plan was bowl full tosses and see if he mishits one eventuallySo is it a case of poor coaching poor execution or a dire gameplan Lets give the modern batsman and the modern bat some credit mdash even perfectly good balls have a habit of collecting air miles all too regularly Im not for one moment suggesting that you can bring runrates plummeting down by being so simplistic as hitting the deck more often But to watch full tosses disappearing into the stands and then to see the cameras pan to the rueful bowler who looks mightily surprised that a taxi has been dispatched to retrieve the ball is alltoocommon Why are you so surprised Mr Bowler Which part of that sequence which ended with the umpire reaching for the sky possibly in danger of being diagnosed with Repetitive Stress Injury RSI is a surpriseCoaches excusesIve heard the excuses offered by bowling coaches The ramp shot makes the yorker less effective Heavy bats mean that if you miss your length you pay the price Shorter boundaries Flat pitches Valid excuses all of them But it still begs the question even allowing for all of the above having considered all the available options did the brains trust settle on a full toss as the best possible choice And if the answer is NO were back to my original point that the modern bowler who does very little else with his life except to practice a closed skill is unable to execute that skill under pressureIf the batsman moves forward moves back or moves sideways theres not much the bowler can do to counter that Everything is in favour of the batsman Kohli and his genre are geniuses make no mistake But Id like to see how this generation of power hitters can score at 15 runs per over without getting out against someone like Joel Garner who just kept nailing his yorker ball after ball You can block the ramp shot if you have confidence in your bowler executing that skill consistentlyIt is inconceivable to imagine someone scoring at the rate that Kohli does digging yorkers out ball after ball and not missing one that crashes into middle stump With batsman as skilled as Kohli De Villiers Gayle et al nothing is impossible With bowlers as poor as the current crop it is only a matter of time before someone scales the impossible heights of an individual double century Until recently only the powerhitters dreamt of scaling that peak Kohli has rewritten the script and in doing so has transformed a bloodbath into a clinical dissection with barely a drop of blood spiltMichael Jeh is a Brisbanebased former firstclass player