Think about Virat Kohli’s final months as a Test cricketer for a moment. The runs had dried up; Australia had exposed the same weakness repeatedly during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, and although there was that magnificent hundred in Perth, precious little followed. By May 2025, Kohli had decided that 123 Tests were enough and walked away from the format he had spent years championing.
Straightforward decline followed by retirement? Mohammad Kaif is not convinced. There is another possibility, he believes: perhaps Kohli did not merely feel that his batting had reached a crossroads, but also that the people around him were no longer quite as convinced about Virat Kohli as Virat Kohli remained about himself.
“When I look at his interviews about this, I feel like there is some disappointment on his face. Even if his form was bad, you are talking about Virat Kohli,” Kaif said on a YouTube channel. He then went considerably further while explaining why he felt Kohli’s Test exit may have been shaped by more than just declining runs.
“It seemed that he felt like he was not getting importance and backing, and the people within had no faith in him. I still think if he would have continued, he would have definitely made a comeback. He is known for comebacks,” Kaif added. It is an important distinction. Kaif is not claiming first-hand knowledge of what happened inside the Indian dressing room, and Kohli himself has not publicly attributed his Test retirement to a lack of support. This is Kaif’s reading of Kohli’s demeanour and the circumstances surrounding one of Indian cricket’s most significant recent retirements.
Kaif points to Kohli’s ODI resurgence
And if you are wondering why Kaif remains so certain Kohli could have hauled himself out of his Test slump, his argument rests heavily on what happened afterwards. Kohli endured consecutive ducks during India’s ODI series in Australia in 2025, inviting another wave of questions about whether his best years were behind him. “If he had been removed after those two ducks in Australia, would we have been able to praise him or look at such knocks from him now?” Kaif said. His point was simple: established greats, in his view, occasionally deserve a different degree of patience because their history suggests they can recover from stretches that would overwhelm less proven players.
“I can understand if it is a new player. But this is Virat Kohli. You cannot apply the same things to him as you do to others. Your form will go bad. No one is a machine or this is not a video game,” he added. Kohli’s subsequent ODI performances have strengthened that argument. He has continued accumulating runs and centuries, including an unbeaten 139 in the opening ODI of the ongoing series against the West Indies, while registering four hundreds and five fifties across his last 11 ODI innings.
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For Kaif, Kohli’s value now extends beyond individual numbers. With Shubman Gill still relatively new to leadership, he believes the presence of an experienced figure such as Kohli remains especially valuable, particularly when India are already operating without the same depth of seniority across other departments. “He is fit and scoring runs. This will benefit Gill, who is a young captain. Look at the bowling; Gill is facing a tough time there due to the lack of senior players. The longer Kohli stays, the better it will be for Gill as a captain and for India overall that way,” Kaif said.
That ultimately forms the heart of Kaif’s argument. Careers can appear to be approaching their conclusion remarkably quickly when form disappears, but when Kohli, he believes the evidence of repeated reinvention should make anyone wary of writing the final chapter too early.