Stay at the Crease. Trust the Game.

What Virat Kohli’s Test career teaches us about surviving — and thriving through — market cycles.

There’s a moment every cricket fan remembers.

It’s not a six. It’s not a cover drive. It’s that shot of Virat Kohli walking back to the pavilion — head down, bat tucked under his arm — after yet another soft dismissal during the 2022 lean patch. The commentators are questioning his place in the squad. Twitter has already written his obituary. Data analysts have charts showing his declining strike rotation. Former players are being polite about it, which somehow feels worse.

And yet.

By the time he retired from Test cricket in May 2025, the man had 30 centuries, 9,230 runs, and the most Test wins as an Indian captain. He walked away on his own terms, with the game still asking him to stay.

The Career Nobody Predicted

Let’s rewind.

When Kohli debuted in Test cricket in 2011 during India’s tour of Australia, the team was getting demolished. India lost the series 0-4. Kohli was raw, aggressive, occasionally reckless. Nobody was writing “generational talent” pieces about him — not yet.

But then came the grind. The quiet accumulation. By the time his peak arrived — roughly 2016 to 2019 — he was averaging north of 55, scoring double centuries for fun, and turning overseas tours into personal highlight reels. Seven double hundreds. The most by any Indian player in Test history.

Then came the drought.

Between 2020 and late 2024, Kohli went through arguably the most scrutinized lean patch in Indian cricket history. Over a thousand days without a Test century at one point. His average over the final 24 months of his career dropped to around 33. Every innings was dissected. Every failure was a headline.

And what did he do? He stayed at the crease. He scored a magnificent unbeaten century in Perth in November 2024 — his first Test hundred in over a year — as if to remind everyone that form is temporary but class has a longer shelf life.

Now Replace “Kohli” with “Nifty”

Here’s where it gets interesting. Because the Indian stock market has lived this exact arc — not once, but repeatedly.

Consider the pattern:

Sound familiar? It should. This is the lean patch. This is Kohli in 2022.

Why We Panic (And Why It’s Normal)

Here’s what nobody tells you about watching your portfolio fall: the panic you feel is not a bug. It’s a feature of being human.

When Kohli was struggling, even his most devoted fans started hedging. “Maybe he should take a break.” “Maybe the reflexes aren’t there anymore.” That’s not disloyalty — it’s the brain doing what brains do. Pattern-matching. Extrapolating. Assuming the current trend will continue forever.

Investors do the same thing. When markets fall 10%, our minds don’t process it as “a 10% correction in an asset class that has delivered 12-14% CAGR over decades.” We process it as: this is going to zero and I should have kept everything in a fixed deposit.

Behavioural finance has a name for this. Several names, actually.

Recency bias makes us overweight the last few weeks of experience. Loss aversion means a 10% loss hurts roughly twice as much as a 10% gain feels good. And action bias — the feeling that we must do something — leads us to the worst possible decision: selling at the bottom.

The Innings That Nobody Remembers

There’s a beautiful paradox in Kohli’s career. The innings that built his legacy aren’t necessarily the centuries. They’re the 40s and 50s during tough tours. The gritty knocks where he fought through movement, survived edges, and ground through sessions without looking pretty.

Investing works the same way.

The months where your SIP buys units at lower NAVs — those boring, unglamorous purchases during market corrections — are often the ones that contribute the most to your long-term wealth. You’ll never celebrate them in real time. You’ll only see their impact years later, when compounding has done its quiet, relentless work.

The 2020 crash didn’t feel like an opportunity when it was happening. It felt like the world was ending. But investors who stayed invested — or better yet, continued their SIPs — saw those units multiply as markets recovered.

What Kohli Never Did

Let’s talk about what Kohli didn’t do during his lean phase, because the parallels are instructive.

He didn’t retire in panic. He could have walked away during the drought. The noise was deafening. He chose to stay, back himself, and wait for his form to return.

He didn’t change his entire technique. He made minor adjustments — subtle things a casual viewer wouldn’t notice. He didn’t suddenly try to become a different player. The fundamentals stayed.

He didn’t listen to every expert. For every person suggesting he should quit, there was someone suggesting a radical technical overhaul. He filtered the noise and trusted his preparation.

Now think about your portfolio.

The Recovery Will Surprise You

Here is perhaps the most important lesson from both cricket and markets: recoveries are rarely gradual. They tend to happen fast, and they tend to happen when you least expect them.

Kohli’s comeback hundred in Perth came after months of nothing. One day, the touch was just back. Markets behave similarly. Some of the biggest single-day gains in Nifty’s history have occurred within days or weeks of major crashes. If you’re not invested when those days arrive, you miss a disproportionate share of long-term returns.

This is why timing the market — pulling out during falls, waiting for the “right time” to re-enter — is so destructive. You’re essentially trying to predict which ball Kohli will score his next boundary on. Even Kohli doesn’t know that. He just makes sure he’s at the crease when it happens.

What You Can Do Right Now

This isn’t advice. It’s a framework — one that works whether markets are up, down, or sideways.

Pause before you act. The best financial decisions are almost never made in the first 24 hours of a market fall. Sleep on it. Then sleep on it again.

Review, don’t react. Check whether your asset allocation still matches your goals and timeline. If it does, the market’s short-term direction is irrelevant to you.

Remember the base rate. Every single major market correction in Indian history has eventually been followed by a recovery. Not some of them. All of them. The duration varies, but the direction has been consistent.

Talk to someone who’s seen cycles. If you work with a financial advisor, this is exactly when their value shows up — not during bull runs when everyone’s a genius, but during corrections when everyone’s afraid.

The Quiet Grind

In his retirement post, Kohli wrote something that applies just as well to long-term investing as it does to Test cricket:

Building wealth is a quiet grind. It’s the SIP that goes through on the 5th of every month regardless of what headlines say. It’s the boring discipline of not checking your portfolio every day. It’s the faith — backed by decades of data — that compounding rewards those who stay.

Kohli stayed at the crease for 14 years. He retired with 30 centuries, a legacy no lean patch could erase, and a career that rewarded patience over panic at every turn.

Your portfolio is asking you the same question his career asked him during those tough years: