Kohli Vs Smith

A very long awaited cricket series is about to begin in a couple of days. Not many competitors make a series interesting as Australia does. Saurav Ganguly said few days, "Virat Kohli is yet to be tested as Captain." While he puts foreign tours to Australia, England, South Africa as the criteria to his real tests, this Australia tour to India, can be one of the biggest barrier to cross for Kohli to prove his mettle.

India Australia series is always seen as competition not just between teams, but also at individual level. Whether it Gavaskar-Border, Tendulkar-Warne, Ganguly-Waugh, Harbhajan-Simond, Zaheer-Gilchrist or any other, but such combinations keep making headlines. The two teams also has a history of few consistent and/or successful captains. These captains have left milestones on their way. And the rivalry between these captains became the face value of the series. From Australian side, while few names like Border, Gilchrist, Ponting, Clarke made it bigger for the team, the Indian counterparts stood tall with names of Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Sachin, Ganguly, Dravid, Kumble  and Dhoni.  The stories of how Gavaskar almost made his team to quit series because of bad umpiring, and how Ganguly made  Waugh wait for the toss, to how Kumble strongly showed disappointment in press over the attitude of Australian cricket and supporting umpiring, all of them attempted to make this rivalry look bigger and sold the series to the viewers. At times, people were more interested in knowing, who said what, rather than knowing the scores and performances of the player.

With the rise of Kohli to captains position for the Indian team and a similar rise of Steve Smith at the Australian helm is possibly gearing up for similar long lasting rivalry for the two teams. Both the caprains have reached the peak point at an early stage of their career. The age is on their side. To add to that, they don't seem to find any competitor in near future from their own team. Both the Captains are fearless, read to take on the rival team at any venue. While Smith has supported sledging as an aggressive move, Kohli is mostly seen on the ground with that attitude. Still if compared, Kohli seem to be more stabilized in his captaincy, while Smith probably is still trying to get hold of his team. If he manages to do that soon as Ponting did back in his time, we can witness one more successful rival captain combination emerging in coming years.