India, March 10 -- In cricket, form is usually treated as a running judgement. A batter is either flowing or failing, either carrying his side or weighing it down. But World Cup finals have a way of shredding that tidy logic. They are not always won by the player who has owned the journey. Sometimes they are taken by the player who has spent weeks looking for one decisive knock.

That is what links Virat Kohli's T20 World Cup 2024 and Abhishek Sharma's T20 World Cup 2026. Both endured tournaments that, by their own standards or by expectation, had been deeply underwhelming. Both then arrived in the final and changed the campaign's memory. In different ways, each turned the biggest night into a personal correction and a national gain.

Vir...