The aura, the intensity and the cameras around Virat Kohli's captaincy

Well, almost as simple.

He dropped R Ashwin and played the debutant Karn Sharma, in the belief that wristspin would bring quicker wickets than fingerspin on Australian pitches. Then, on the final afternoon, Kohli kept playing his shots and going after an outlandish fourth-innings target even after India had lost every other recognised batter, this when he had already scored hundreds in both innings and had the chance to pull down shutters and try to bat out a draw.

Australia scored at five-and-a-half runs an over against Karn's legspin over their two innings, and he never played Test cricket again. And Kohli's willingness to risk defeat in the pursuit of victory ended up in defeat.

It wasn't the first or last time Pujara found himself out of the XI following a short stretch of poor form. Ajinkya Rahane would experience this too, during the South Africa tour of 2017-18. It would seem an irony, then, that the last year of Kohli's captaincy would feature an unwavering belief in Pujara and Rahane despite both experiencing far longer streaks of even leaner form.

This reflected, possibly, a tempering of Kohli's early impulsiveness. Or it perhaps just reflected a greater belief in his two middle-order comrades after they had both proven their ability multiple times in difficult situations, and a recognition that their low averages over a prolonged period may have had as much to do with the bowlers and conditions India were facing, Test match after Test match, as any drop in their ability. Kohli's returns over the same period were hardly any better.

Kohli's early trigger-happiness, then, may have simply been a consequence of having a younger and less experienced core group of players. As they grew older and more settled in the side, they may simply have become harder to displace. It's a natural cycle that all teams go through.

The other quality Kohli showed in his Adelaide captaincy debut, however, never changed, and he always remained willing to risk defeat in the pursuit of Test wins. That quality would come to define his captaincy.

Nowhere was this more evident than in his consistent use of five-bowler combinations. His predecessor MS Dhoni had also been keen on it, but the fifth bowler was usually someone in the mould of Stuart Binny or Ravindra Jadeja, who in the early stage of his Test career was viewed as a batting allrounder, even if that aspect of his game took longer to live up to its potential than his bowling.

It didn't quite come off in Galle - even though it took a freak innings from Dinesh Chandimal to turn what looked like an inevitable Sri Lanka defeat into an unexpected win - and India tempered their approach as they came back to win the series, with Binny recalled as a hedge-your-bets allrounder. But Kohli had shown his willingness to sacrifice batting depth to heighten India's chances of picking up 20 wickets, and it would remain a feature of his captaincy.

And when Rahane stood in after 36 all out, India brought in Jadeja as a second spinner at the MCG rather than replace Kohli with a specialist batter.

In a sense, Kohli was lucky to take over the captaincy when the bulk of those players, particularly a promising group of bowlers, were all just beginning to mature at the Test level. Ashwin, Jadeja, Ishant, Umesh and Mohammed Shami had experienced most of their growing pains under Dhoni.

As with everything else, Kohli may have only had a limited role to play in the rise of those two bowlers. But it's not a knock on his captaincy. It's just a reminder that a team's success is the culmination of a number of processes overseen by a number of skilled decision-makers, of which the captain is only one. It's probably healthier anyway when less power is concentrated in one pair of hands, even if - at the peak of his powers as batter and captain - it seemed as if Kohli was Indian cricket's biggest power centre.

The aura around Kohli's captaincy, in truth, was much larger than the actual scope of his role, and this was simply a reflection of how aggressively personality-driven cricket's marketing and packaging has become. Even Sachin Tendulkar didn't have a dedicated camera following his every movement to ensure that the producer could bring you every pump of his fist and every raise of his eyebrow. And as the camera sought Kohli out, Kohli played up to it, a symbiotic relationship that filled our screens with frenzied send-offs, fingers on lips to quieten the opposition's fans, and hands cupped around ears to raise the volume of India's fans.

This, of course, is who Kohli is, even if it's a hyperreal version of him. Even if that on-field personality's contribution to India's results was negligible, it's the part of his captaincy that will be remembered most fondly - or, if you fall on that side of the divide, with the most distaste. It's possible that he'll remain just as expressive when he is no longer captain, but it's likely that Kohli-cam will play a smaller role in our lives, leaving you with curiously mixed emotions. Even if you believed Kohli-cam to be the most egregious example of a team game being turned into a personality cult, you might just find yourself missing it.