Virat Kohli exit as ODI captain comes amid lowest win-loss ratio since 2013

Cricketer Virat Kohli’s exit as Indian team captain in One Day Internationals comes on the back of a visible decline in the team’s success ratio under him.

But his legacy remains better than others before him. And talk of the exit unchaining the batsmen in him perhaps seems counterintuitive when one looks at the numbers on his individual performance as even he led the team.

He won around four matches for every game that he lost for much of his captaincy, shows a Business Standard analysis of data from ESPNcricinfo. But this win/loss ratio had slipped to 2.41 by  March 2021. This was the lowest since 2013. It is calculated by dividing the cumulative number of wins up to a given match and dividing it by the number of losses till then. He started with a loss. But soon caught up. He won the next seven games. His win/loss ratio was 8 by match nine. This was the peak. It showed a decline later, but the real steady fall compared to his own standards began in 2018 (see chart 1).

The win/loss ratio he ended with is still higher than all others who captained India for more matches than him.  MS Dhoni (200 matches) had a win/loss ratio of 1.5. Mohammad Azharuddin (174 matches) and Sourav Ganguly (146 matches) ended at 1.2. Rahul Dravid (79 matches) was 1.3 while world-cup winning captain Kapil Dev (74 matches) was 1.2.

The lack of success in ICC (International Cricket Council) tournaments including world cups is also said to have been a factor in his exit. His win/loss ratio drops to 1.2 in such tournaments.

It has been suggested that he may be able to focus better on his batting in the absence of the captaincy burden. The numbers seem to suggest that captaincy didn’t really affect his batting in a negative way. In fact, his batting average has steadily moved up even in recent times. He averaged 46.5 in the beginning of 2011. This has moved to 59.1 currently (see chart 2).

A look at runs scored during captaincy and otherwise seems to suggest something similar. His batting average when he wasn’t the captain was 51.29. It is 72.65 as captain. The strike rate also improves. This is the number of runs scored per 100 balls faced. It was 89.39 as a non-captain player. It moved to 98.28 as captain. Some of this may be to do with the advent of Twenty20 Internationals. A large number of games he played as captain came in years where runs scored and strike rates have often tended to move up because of structural changes that the new game format introduced within cricket. But he has played fewer innings as captain (91 versus 154) than otherwise but has scored nearly an equal number of centuries (21 versus 22 as non-captain).

Kohli continues as Test captain. What he will miss out on perhaps in leading India in 2023 when India is set to host the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup. But given his track record in ICC events, perhaps it would be just as well, for the team and for him.