From 'Cheeku' To 'King': How Virat Kohli Forced Gen-Z To Fall In Love With Test Cricket

Virat Kohli entered Indian drawing rooms as a quintessential "West Delhi boy'', grew on his fans like a never-ending love story with his boundless passion and finally called time on his career in whites when his legion of admirers yearned for 'One Last Dance'. In his mind, he knew that although "it is not easy", it did "feel right". The question to be asked is when exactly did Kohli get this feeling?. Perhaps it was after a torrid tour of Australia where he scored only 91 runs after his second innings century in Perth. Swing and bounce together made life difficult and even for the eternal optimists, a second coming looked distant.

Yet, Indian cricket needed him in England but it seems, the mind, more than the body, had taken enough battering to last a lifetime and he didn't want to go through that rigour for another five Test series. Virat Kohli, the Test devotee, had decided to wave the white flag.

From Cheeku to Virat to King Kohli

From being the chubby 'Cheeku' for his seniors, Virat for his contemporaries and now 'Bhaiyya' to the juniors, 'King Kohli' did traverse a fair distance and experienced joys of highs and the despair of lows in equal measure.

There was an 18-year-old Kohli, who in 2006, put his father Prem Kohli's last rites on hold, scored 90 to save Delhi from follow on and headed straight to the crematorium from an empty Feroz Shah Kotla.

And then in 2025, 36-year-old global superstar Kohli was castled by a little known Railways medium pacer Himagshu Sangwan in-front of nearly 20,000 fans, who had come to the Ranji Trophy ground, to watch their hero bat, one last time in whites against a shiny red SG ball.

In the interim 18 years, he scored those 30 Test hundreds and his following grew exponentially with