Watching Virat Kohli in the nets before play at Melbourne was to realise that this is a man who believes that you have to get angry to get things done. He was only receiving soft throwdowns, but when he didn't middle the ball he punched his bat and head-butted the air. The slightest error brought a curse. A handsome fellow in the frontier guardsman style, Kohli is not necessarily someone you would trust to keep the border quiet.
Kohli may be the angriest man in cricket, or he may just be the man who makes the least effort to disguise it. Throughout Australia's first innings in Melbourne he was kicking the turf and shaking his head at every misfield, which meant he was angry pretty much all the time. While batting, he resembled an overcaffeinated, underfed pool guard, on the shortest of fuses and ready to pick a fight with anyone who so much as thought about diving in the shallow end.
What makes Kohli unusual is that this constant simmer is so productive. Sport, particularly a skill requiring such fine-tuning as Test match batting, is thought to require composure, the suppression of strong feeling, almost like Wordsworth's formula for poetic creativity: emotion recollected in tranquillity. Angry Boy Kohli is the exception. He rides his waves of temper to heights which, this summer, have been as glorious as those achieved by any batsman to have visited Australia. His poetry is not Wordsworth's kind but that of the late Maya Angelou, the poet of the underdog, for whom anger was "a fire that burns all clean".
Touchy at the best of times, Kohli was set off on Sunday when Mitchell Johnson took the second new ball. Earlier, having come out to bat two balls after the start, Kohli had dominated Johnson with his magisterial cover-drives and cheeky late cuts, stripping 27 runs off the 21 balls he had faced from the left-armer. In doing so, he also protected his partner Ajinkya Rahane from Johnson. In his first two-and-a-half hours at the crease, Rahane sparkled his way to 70 runs, showing his impish footwork to all of the bowlers except Johnson, whom he had faced for precisely one delivery.
The second new ball brought the climacteric of the day. India were three wickets down for 275, and Kohli and Rahane were in full flow. Johnson came back on. Immediately, he and Kohli began bickering like siblings on a long car trip. Two overs into his spell, Johnson shied at the stumps in the how-very-dare-you-hit-the-ball-to-me manner, and struck Kohli. Johnson's apology was sincere but curt.
What really sent the pair hurtling towards couples therapy came moments later, when Kohli sliced a drive straight to the invisible man at fifth slip (although, given Australia's fielding this day, he would surely have dropped it). This was too much for Johnson, whose outburst was too much for Kohli, and so it snowballed. But perhaps even for Kohli too much anger is a bad thing. He nicked a full ball in Johnson's next over, and skied a hook in the one after that. Obligingly, Shane Watson dropped the former and Brad Haddin couldn't make it to the latter, as if they, like rubber-necking neighbours, were enjoying the spectacle too much to want it to end.
A few balls later, Kohli was so eager to get down to Johnson's end that he all but ran himself out. When he played an uneventful forward defence, Johnson applauded him sarcastically. By then, however, the storm had blown itself out and Kohli and Rahane had won the big moment.
As the ball softened, Angry Boy kept going, spinning his bat Alec Stewart-style, fanning his legs in his wide stance, getting into perfect position and flicking his right hand over drive after drive, hitting through the ball with a head so still it might have been tethered to the ground with a cable. Rahane overtook him on the way to his century. When the younger man reached his hundred, he leapt about in unrestrained glee, and several Australian players clapped. When Kohli reached his, he selected the Indian flags in the MCG and saluted them, but only them, and the fielders scratched their armpits. He kissed his bat and blew a kiss to his sweetheart, too, just to show that he wouldn't let these horrid types make him late for dinner.
Kohli's batting had already been a highlight of the summer, even if he had not made another run since Adelaide. Here, he and Rahane gave India 262 runs and a vision of a future where they come back to this country with a few thousand more runs in their lockers and the chance to do what none of their predecessors have managed.
Not this time, however. Mental fatigue eventually caught up with umpire Kumar Dharmasena, who gave Nathan Lyon the wicket of Rahane, a sympathetic gesture from one off-spinner to another, and the familiar tale of India's long tail unravelled again. By the end of the day, Kohli and Johnson were still at it, though, and the umpires' interventions had all the impact of a forceful letter to the ABC. Kohli, in truth, might better direct his feelings at some of his teammates, not least his captain. But you sense that he will take his anger where he can find it, and use it as fuel.
As he walked off the ground, he could look at the scoreboard and see 169 runs beside his own name, and 133 against Johnson's. In the last over, he had given Johnson his wicket, as if the game demanded a peace offering. Johnson walked off with a tired smile. Kohli raised his arms to the entire ground.
This poem had a beginning, a middle and now an end. And Kohli looked happy.
