The Week India – July 21, 2019

44 THE WEEK • JULY 21, 2019

WORLD CUP

ICC

2019

Their batting prowess aside, captains Kane

Williamson and Virat Kohli have little in common

A SONG OF

ICE AND FIRE

hey are two of the best in this gener-

ation, but that is where the similari-

ties end. Kane Williamson, the New

Zealand captain, is calm like his

hometown of Tauranga. He speaks

and bats softly, and looks like the

boy next door. Virat Kohli, on the other hand, has a

styled look, is aggressive on the field and has every

bit of that ‘never-back-down attitude’ of a Delhiite.

In terms of fan following, Kohli is a brand on his

own. Williamson seems like he does not want to

be one. Kohli has 30.4 million followers on Twitter

and 37.2 million on Instagram. He is the lone Indian

on the Forbes list of world’s highest-paid athletes.

Williamson is not on Twitter or Facebook; his Insta-

gram account has 4,39,000 followers.

As India faced New Zealand in the rainy semi-fi-

nal in Manchester, the contrast between the

captains was clear as day. Kohli had led India into

the semi-finals as the top ranked team. They had

won seven, lost one, and had one washed-out game.

Williamson, meanwhile, led a team that huffed and

puffed its way into the semi-finals. They won five,

lost three, and had one abandoned game. Barring

the odd display from Jimmy Neesham and Ross

Taylor, the onus of batting was on Williamson’s

shoulders throughout the tournament. Including

the semi-final, he has scored 548 runs in the tour-

nament, including two hundreds and two fifties.

Williamson has had to stand like a rock to alter his

team’s fortunes. And he did so again to take his

team to its second consecutive World Cup final.

As skippers, Kohli and Williamson are chalk and

T

What stands out is his [Williamson’s]

calmness. He put himself in that

position batting first in these overcast

conditions, knowing that the whole

team plays around him.

—Kapil Dev

former India captain

BY NEERU BHATIA/Manchester

cheese. The semi-final showed that. Before the

match, Williamson shrugged off the underdogs

tag. After it, he chose equanimity. “It was a brilliant

fighting effort from our guys,” he said in the post-

match press conference. “The sort of mentality re-

quired to stay in the game for long. There is so much

more to winning and losing. You identify parts of

matches not directly in your control. You need to

move away to give you clarity. It is important not to

be scarred by those games [we lost].”

Kohli’s face, as usual, gave away his feelings. “To

go out after 45 minutes of bad cricket is saddening,

heartbreaking,” he said after the match. “You are

number one in the points table. This is part and

parcel of the game. One is gutted but have to accept

it and move on. It has happened to us before.”

India had previously failed to make the final of the

2015 World Cup and the T20 World Cup in 2016. In

2017, Kohli’s men made it to the Champions Trophy

final, but lost to Pakistan.