Kohli roared back into form with his 9th IPL hundred (Courtesy: PTI)

Virat Kohli's double act: When the human and the superhuman showed up in Raipur

IPL 2026, RCB vs KKR: After back-to-back ducks, Virat Kohli walked out in Raipur nervous, celebrated a single like it was a six, and then scored a match-winning hundred. One night, two sides of the most compelling cricketer of his generation were on full display.

14 May 2026, 03:06 by Akshay Ramesh · India Today

In Short

Virat Kohli celebrated his first run in Raipur like he had scored a century
He indeed went on to score a century, leading RCB’s chase vs KKR
Kohli was human enough to feel the pressure, superhuman enough to make it irrelevant

He tucked one to leg. A single. One run. And Virat Kohli punched the air like he'd just won the World Cup.

The crowd at Raipur's Shaheed Veer Narayan Singh International Stadium erupted. People laughed. Not at him, but with him. Because they understood. Because for once, the mask slipped just enough to remind everyone that beneath the swagger and the centuries and the ice-cold chase finishes, there is a man. A very human man.

RCB vs KKR: HIGHLIGHTS | SCORECARD

"I was nervous," he would admit after. "I just wanted to get off the mark and just celebrate and have a bit of fun there."

Virat Kohli. Nervous. About getting off the mark.

That line deserves to sit for a moment, because it is both extraordinary and completely ordinary all at once.

He had walked in under the weight of back-to-back ducks, against LSG, against MI, his most barren stretch of the IPL 2026 season. There had been whispers. Was the form tapering off at a critical juncture? Were the ducks a sign of something more?

At the crease, commentator Ian Bishop was building it up ball by ball: "Can he get a run, can he get a run?"

Then debutant Saurabh Dubey, the same pacer who had been getting the ball to move both ways and had already unsettled Jacob Bethell, bent one in, and Kohli calmly tucked it to the leg side and sprinted through. One run. One fist pump. One enormous roar.

The moment went viral within minutes. But it was what came after that told the real story.

He scored 105.

Unbeaten. Off 60 balls. His ninth IPL century. In a chase. On a pitch that was not easy to bat on. Against a KKR attack that had just won four games on the trot.

HIS TEAMMATES PROPHETIC WORDS

Two days before the match, Kohli's RCB teammate Krunal Pandya had said something that raised a few eyebrows at the time.

After his own match-winning knock against Mumbai Indians, Pandya had offered this about Kohli: "First of all sir, Virat Kohli is a champion player. If he doesn't score runs in two matches, I actually get more excited because you know Virat Kohli is going to come back strongly. He has a huge hunger inside him. He is a different beast, right?"

It sounded like loyal teammate talk. In hindsight, it was a prophecy.

Because here's the thing about Kohli: the ducks did not break him. They fuelled him.

"Pressure is a privilege," Kohli said after the match.

"It actually keeps you humble, keeps you focused, makes you work hard at practice again. A couple of games that don't go your way, you start feeling a bit of nervousness again. It helps you to go out there and work on your game and back yourself even more... And at the end of the day, when you look back, those failures are so important because they put you back into the place that gets you the performances in the first place."

And then there was this: not scoring eats him up. It bothers him. For a man who strides to the crease like he owns it, who has made the impossible look routine for two decades, these are startlingly raw words. But that is exactly the point. The composure you see at the crease is not the absence of feeling. It is feeling, compressed and redirected, channelled into footwork, into shot selection, into that fist pump for a single that somehow said more than any century celebration could.

WAS HE OUT OF FORM?

What was remarkable about the innings itself was how little it looked like a man searching for form. He did not come out swinging to prove a point. He played his tempo. He found his gaps. He made the chase look like clockwork.

In the powerplay, he systematically dismantled Vaibhav Arora, picking gaps with surgical precision. RCB lost Jacob Bethell early, but Kohli and Devdutt Padikkal stitched together a composed 92-run stand that broke the back of KKR's bowling.

When Padikkal fell for 39, captain Rajat Patidar walked in — only to be rocked by a Kartik Tyagi bouncer that crashed into his helmet. Patidar slowed, understandably, searching for rhythm. Kohli read it instantly and took the onus upon himself, accelerating through the middle overs without fuss, without flourish, as if he had simply decided that this was his to finish.

Then came the shot of the match, a moment that only a player of his experience could have pulled off. In the 14th over, facing left-arm spinner Anukul Roy, Kohli was beaten by the flight a bit, but stayed perfectly still, waited, and chipped the ball over the bowler's head for six. He barely followed through. The ball still sailed into the stands. That is not technique. That is accumulated wisdom, distilled into a single unhurried moment.

The very next over, he showed the other side — pure wrists, pure power — whipping a fuller delivery from Tyagi into the mid-wicket stands. Wickets fell around him, but Kohli stayed till the end. Eleven boundaries, three sixes. The remaining 43 runs came the old-fashioned way: running hard between the wickets. At 36. In the heat of Raipur.

Padikkal, who had the best vantage point for most of the innings, put it simply after the game: "I had the best seat in the house tonight. Some of the shots he played were simply remarkable. Coming into this game after two ducks is never easy. And he showed why he is who he is. To not have that play on his mind and go out there and bat the way he does is something incredible."

Kohli is 36 now. He has retired from Test cricket and T20Is. He lives in London, stepping back from the grind to spend time with family. When he shows up for IPL or for India's ODIs, it is a considered, deliberate choice — and he brings everything with him when he does.

Before Wednesday, there were real questions about whether he would hit 600-plus runs in a fourth consecutive IPL season — a streak that speaks to a consistency almost no one in the history of the tournament can match. With 105 in Raipur and games still to come, he is firmly back in the race for the Orange Cap, and that streak is alive.

Virat Kohli goes through doubt. He feels pressure. He gets nervous about a single run. And then he scores a hundred and breaks the record for the fastest player to 14,000 T20 runs.

Human and superhuman. Sometimes in the same over.

That is Virat Kohli. That has always been Virat Kohli.

- Ends