Sting In The Tail Turns Kohli Into World Cup's Tragic Hero

IN THE MIDST of the silence that engulfed the arena stood Virat Kohli, his vacant stare wandering into the skies, with the forlorn look of someone betrayed.

- SANDIP G

He puffed his cheeks out in anguish and ruffled his hair, in unusual disorder, with long cold fingers, as he waited impatiently for the torture of collecting the player of the tournament plank, a souvenir of pain, on the most heartbreaking of all nights.

Even in the most harrowing hour, he was the centre of the crowd's attraction. A section of teary-eyed fans chanted his name, as glances of sympathy peered from every corner of the stadium. Those would have made his pain even more intense.

Hastily, coldly, he picked the piece of meaningless trophy, its value no more than that of a stone, and hurried up the long stairway to the dressing room, the trophy dangling limply at his side. There, in the anonymity of a dark corner, he could finally weep, break down and wallow in the night that was and the night that never was.

The day, and the night, had the promise of a perfect ending for a near-perfect batsman in an almost-perfect World Cup. It didn't end that way. It's a pain only sportspersons could fully comprehend; years and months of physical labour and mental preparation blown away in one aberration of a night. All the success of past crumbling in one night. The sun indeed would rise the next day, as Rahul Dravid said in the press conference, gleaning from his own vast experience of heartbreaks, but the darkness will linger, the bitterness would cling on, the scar shall remain unhealed. The athlete in them would move on; perhaps not the human inside them. The defeat would haunt the 14 colleagues of his, the support staff and a one billion-plus population, but it would torment Kohli even more.