England vs India 2018: Can Virat Kohli cut through the scars of the past?

Virat Kohli ended India's last tour of England with a series average of 13.40 - a deficit of 40 runs compared to his average 4 years later. Kohli had 6 centuries in 29 tests by the end of that tour, and now, he has a total of 21 in just 37 more tests - 6 of them double. Kohli wasn't the brand that he is today. Today, he is cricket.

But his brand doesn't matter. His greatness can wait. All attempts to prove him a legend stop at the very stats of that summer of 2014 in England. The magnitude of it magnifies for Kohli is now such a big wicket in world cricket.

What happened on that tour looks like a statistical anomaly. That sort of failure it had been. And nobody's letting him forget that.

In a world of instant gratification and short attention span, Kohli's failure in England remains well remembered. So much so that at times it doesn't even register that an average of 13.40 isn't the worst Kohli has performed in a test series.

His worst is, in fact, an average of 9.40 (Kohli played in first 3 of the 4 tests in Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2016-17) against Australia at home. This was just more than a year and a half ago. Only this time India won the series. Kohli was already God at home and thus we couldn't care less.

We are more empathetic towards team failures than the ones by individuals. We have our favourites and we try to find gods in them. Our own small games inside the bigger ones, our small victories inside bigger defeats, something to salvage our pride with, something that helps us sleep at night.

However, catastrophic individual performances in even more catastrophic team defeats are hard to swallow. Fans are never ready for these sort of tragedies. The pain remains. This is not helping Kohli's cause one bit.

It hurts when a cricket ball strikes the flesh. It stings for a while. It leaves a mark on the body. But the batsman can't show any pain. That would be a sign of weakness. The ball had stung nonetheless. 4 years back. The marks still exist. Kohli can't afford to be weak though.

Everybody has waited for him to show the pain. He has not shown any yet. The bowler is back to the top of his run-up. Eyes on the batsman. Perhaps, at the ribcage again. Kohli knows it.

The opposition has found a chink in his armour and they are not gonna let it go. But 'let go' is what Kohli must do. He needs to find that peace within and cut his way through the noise into the zone that made him the player he is today.

It will be interesting to see how Kohli approaches this. Will he approach this like a brat hurling expletives at himself for failure before asking, no demanding, to get on with it? Or will he approach this as a professional oblivious to the scars of the past?

We will see.