From hero to bum, how form changes the fortunes of the best

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Editor's note: It was a regulation stroke—the Indian batsman’s bread and butter. Ball on length, middle to leg line, the one you instinctively close the bat face on and work on the leg side for runs. At the crease was a modern master—and yet the shot, played tentatively, popped the ball up in the air to fall just short of the square-leg fielder. The sigh of relief around the DY Patil Stadium cut through the clamour of the commentary; it escalated into an explosion of cheers when the batsman, to the very next ball, tried the stroke again and, this time, got it right, placing the ball to the right of square leg to find the boundary. If you went by the soundtrack alone, you would have thought the batsman had hit the winning runs. All that had happened, though, at the start of the second innings of the IPL game between Rajasthan Royals and Royal Challengers Bangalore on 26 April, was that Virat Kohli, one of the most influential batsmen of this generation, had broken a sequence of two first-ball ducks …