Pho­to: In­dia’s Vi­rat Kohli ges­tures to a mem­ber of a crowd dur­ing play on the first day of the fourth crick­et test be­tween Aus­tralia and In­dia at the Mel­bourne Crick­et Ground, Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia, on Dec. 26, 2024. (AP Pho­to/Asan­ka Bren­don Rat­nayake, File)

In­dia great Vi­rat Kohli re­tired from test crick­et Mon­day af­ter play­ing 123 match­es in his glo­ri­ous 14-year red-ball ca­reer.

Kohli made his test de­but in 2011 against West In­dies and has been In­dia’s stand­out bat­ter since Sachin Ten­dulkar’s re­tire­ment in 2013.

“As I step away from this for­mat, it’s not easy — but it feels right,” Kohli post­ed on In­sta­gram. “It’s been 14 years since I first wore the bag­gy blue in Test crick­et. Hon­est­ly, I nev­er imag­ined the jour­ney this for­mat would take me on. It’s test­ed me, shaped me, and taught me lessons I’ll car­ry for life.”

The 36-year-old Kohli’s re­tire­ment comes on­ly days af­ter Ro­hit Shar­ma stepped down from test crick­et, tak­ing two se­nior bat­ters out of se­lec­tion con­tention for In­dia’s tour to Eng­land. In­dia will need to se­lect a new skip­per and re­shape its bat­ting or­der for the five-test se­ries start­ing June 20.

Kohli scored 9,230 runs in­clud­ing 30 cen­turies and 31 half-cen­turies at a test bat­ting av­er­age of 46.85. He al­so led In­dia in 68 test match­es and was In­dia’s most suc­cess­ful cap­tain with 40 test wins.

The for­mer In­dia cap­tain is one of the high­est-pro­file peo­ple in crick­et, with 271 mil­lion fol­low­ers on In­sta­gram and al­most 68 mil­lion on X, and he owns bat­ting records in the longest and the lim­it­ed-overs for­mats. He’s ex­pect­ed to con­tin­ue play­ing one-day in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et, and he’s still heav­i­ly in­volved in the lu­cra­tive Twen­ty20 In­di­an Pre­mier League, which was sus­pend­ed last Fri­day for a week fol­low­ing the es­ca­lat­ing mil­i­tary ten­sions with Pak­istan.

Kohli said the tra­di­tions and ebbs and flows of the five-day for­mat were spe­cial to him, in­clud­ing “the qui­et grind, the long days, the small mo­ments that no one sees but that stay with you for­ev­er.”

“I am walk­ing away with a heart full of grat­i­tude — for the game, for the peo­ple I shared the field with, and for every sin­gle per­son who made me feel seen along the way,” he wrote. “I will al­ways look back at my test ca­reer with a smile. #269, sign­ing off.”

Kohli fin­ished as In­dia’s fourth high­est scor­er in tests af­ter Ten­dulkar (15,921), Rahul Dravid (13,265) and Sunil Gavaskar (10,122). He al­so scored the most dou­ble cen­turies for In­dia in tests — sev­en — one more than the leg­endary Ten­dulkar.

His crown­ing glo­ry in test crick­et, though, came as cap­tain. His 40 test wins set a record for an In­dia cap­tain, sur­pass­ing MS Dhoni (27 from 60 tests) and Sourav Gan­gu­ly (21 from 49 tests).

He fin­ished fourth in the all-time list of most wins as test cap­tain, be­hind South Africa’s Graeme Smith (53 from 109 tests), and Aus­tralia’s Ricky Ponting (48 from 77 tests) and Stephen Waugh (41 from 57 tests).

Kohli al­so led In­dia to the In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et Coun­cil’s No. 1 rank­ing in test crick­et af­ter tak­ing over from Dhoni in 2014-15, and helped his side main­tain a strong­hold on that po­si­tion for five years.

In 2018, he guid­ed In­dia to its first ever test se­ries vic­to­ry against Aus­tralia in Aus­tralia.

Spec­u­la­tion over Kohli’s test fu­ture has in­ten­si­fied since In­dia’s five-test tour of Aus­tralia fin­ished in Jan­u­ary. Af­ter scor­ing a 30th test hun­dred in Perth, Kohli’s se­ries ta­pered off and he fin­ished it with 190 runs in nine in­nings at av­er­age 23.75. Still, his im­pact on the game in In­dia and around the crick­et world has been huge.

“Thank you, Vi­rat Kohli. An era ends in test crick­et but the lega­cy will con­tin­ue for­ev­er,” the Board of Con­trol for Crick­et in In­dia post­ed in a state­ment on X. “His con­tri­bu­tions to team In­dia will for­ev­er be cher­ished!”

AP crick­et: https://ap­news.com/hub/crick­et

NEW DEL­HI, In­dia (AP) —