Kohli on an emotional rollercoaster

Virat Kohli doesn't keep his emotions to himself. He abuses - directed at nobody in particular - when he scores a century or takes a match-turning catch or even when he misfields. He flips the bird to fans that abuse his mother and his sister. He rages, and suppresses a lump in the throat, when he is asked if he feels the pressure of keeping his place in the side.

It is a dangerous route. It leaves you open to many judging eyes. Go to any message board that has discussed Kohli's incident with the fans at the SCG, and all you see is people saying Kohli should be the last person complaining about abuse because he is seen speaking the choicest of Hindi profanities on the field. No allowance is made for the fact that Kohli abuses neither the fans nor the opposition, neither his team-mates nor the umpire. It is just a release of the pressure building up - granted it doesn't look pretty, and he will surely realise it when his children watch highlights of daddy's first international hundred, or hopefully before that - but it is somehow supposed to deserve direct abuse from the crowd.

The fact is, we hate us these cocky little punks. We wait for the smallest possible slump from the likes of Shane Warne and Kevin Pietersen, so that we can pass overall judgements. On their IQ, their appearance, their romances, their smoking, their drinking. If we don't spare Warne and Pietersen, who is this Kohli, we think - this 23-year-old from Delhi who wears tattoos and studied stubbles, who has been in more advertisements than Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman put together, who top-edges bouncers and is yet to score a Test century?

I have scored eight ODI centuries, he says. Most of them, I have scored in tall chases. Often I come to bat at No. 3. I am a World Cup winner. I reached 1000 ODI runs faster than any other Indian. I scored more ODI runs last year than anybody else ... Ravi Shastri says he is a better batsman than Dravid and Sourav Ganguly were at his age. He has done squat in Tests, the real format, we say. I need time, Kohli says.

"I don't know why people were after me even after the first game [in Melbourne]," Kohli said in Perth. "I had scored two fifties before that in the match against West Indies [in Mumbai], and suddenly I was on the verge of being dropped after one match.

"Scoring eight hundreds in one-day internationals can't be a fluke. It's international cricket as well. I don't know why people have been questioning my technique or temperament so much. I have been playing at No. 3 in one-dayers, and I have not gone in to bat in very good situations in all of the 70 matches I have played. All of this is a learning curve for me. I am playing on difficult wickets, in Australia."

Again, nothing is held back. There is emotion in this quote. There is anger, there is slight sense of entitlement, there is a reiteration that after all he is just a 23-year-old still coming to terms with international cricket, that he is unsure of himself like most 23-year-olds are. After his Test debut, in the West Indies, he told ESPNcricinfo that he was overawed by Test cricket, that he thought it was "a huge, huge change". A huge, huge change it has been. Almost to the tune of the one who went to the finest school all right, but was never taught how to live out on the street.

Kohli, though, has stuck it out through this emotional tour. On one of the first days of the tour, fans of Indian origin heckled him in the nets, "We have taken five days off, make sure they don't go waste." Then the MCG Test was almost a sleepwalk. And it is true his was the first head asked for. Sydney was a horror show too, not just with the crowd.

The captain, though, didn't want to kill his confidence, and persisted with him. If the fear of being dropped bore such rage in Kohli, one can only imagine what not being considered good enough for a team that has lost seven away Tests in a row must be doing to Rohit Sharma. That story is for another time, though. Some of those keeping the youngsters out had to fight harder and longer to break in.

In Perth, though, Kohli top-scored in both India's innings. You could see he had been getting better every day. You could see him punching his bat in frustration, when, stranded on 75, he saw the tail disintegrate at the other end, in a matter of one over. This was his chance to show he belonged, to be the first Indian to score a century on this trip, but it wasn't to be. You were left wondering how he would have emoted had he got there.

Not that that would have mattered to the result. Cricket, though, allows you to follow these little personal journeys too. And it has left us wondering what Adelaide will bring for him, how this emotional rollercoaster will end.